Clark Kent Returns
by Lucillia
Summary: The Kents found Kal-El in 1908. As they say, all things pass in time: Perry, Jimmy, Bruce, Lois, even Clark. And yet, Superman still endures. The thing is, Clark Kent was more than a mask Superman wore at the Daily Planet; and for the cold and burned-out Superman to be the hero he once was, he's going to have to bring Clark back in a world that has long-since passed him by.
1. Prologue: The Bat and the Alien

**Author's Note: **This story came about after I had noticed that, with each film and comic reboot, they keep pushing Superman's arrival on Earth further and further forward from the original arrival that would've taken place in or around 1908 or so in order for him to have made his debut as Superman in 1938. After noticing this, I wondered exactly how far forward they can go before they have to set Superman's arrival and adoption by the Kents in the past for there to be a willing suspension of disbelief due to the fact that slipping an undocumented alien baby into American society unnoticed becomes harder and harder to do with each passing decade for a variety of reasons. Remembering hearing from at least one source that Superman is potentially immortal and would stop aging at one point, an idea began to germinate. An idea of a 106 year-old Superman trying to re-integrate with the society he'd started distancing himself from decades earlier.

I will tell you right now that I'm far more familiar with the Superman cartoons from the 1940s, the Christopher Reeve films, the Batman movies from the 80s/90s, and the animated series from that era than I am with the comics. Because of this, despite the fact that the story doesn't fit in with them, elements of these will likely be very heavily present.

I also don't have a pairing planned for Superman/Clark Kent, so don't ask.

**Author's Note addendum/Alert to readers: **When I made Clark's new work partner 1/2 of the kissing couple of chapter 1, I'd intended it to be more of an "awkwardness ensues" thing. Chapter 2 seemed to be drawing too many parallels between Eric and Lois, so I am firmly establishing here and now that Eric is happily married to the other 1/2 of the kissing couple and will not be pairing up with Clark. They will be friends and work partners at the most, and Eric will happily remain with his spouse.

One thing Clark Kent/Superman will not be in this story is uncharacteristically gay. Another thing he won't be is a spouse stealing, home-wrecking, jerk so, you won't see him taking anyone's husband or wife away from them.

As far as I'm concerned, Eric's just one half of a modern married couple that can be found in today's society and not some attempt at "Stealth Slash". Whatever Eric and his spouse does in the privacy of their own bedroom stays there, and will not end up on screen.

**Now, on with the story...**

* * *

The snow swirled about him as the wind picked it up from atop the ice, and he shivered in the cold despite the black parka which was rated for temperatures up to fifty degrees below zero. His son, who was the current Robin, had stitched ears onto the black garment, making it look a bit like a chunky version of his bat cowl. The wind that howled around him in the desolate snowy expanse dropped the temperature lower and lower, -48, -49...

Nobody had known what would be created that night back in 1920 when the Wayne family had taken a shortcut through an alley on their way home from watching The Mark of Zorro, least of all Bruce Wayne. Bruce had been the first, then the first Robin Dick Grayson for a time, before he resumed his duties as the first Nightwing, then Damian Wayne through whose line the tradition continued. He was the latest of that line.

The swirling blinding white beneath the Arctic sunlight made him nervous, edgy. Bats belonged in the shadows, in the twilight, the dusk, the darkness. After generations in the night, the Wayne family was practically nocturnal, and some people were beginning to half-jokingly suggest that they were vampires. Neither he nor his were vampires however, just men who patrolled a seemingly eternal night putting fear into the hearts of those who would prey upon the weak. He, like his predecessors, was the Dark Knight of Gotham as his son would be after him, and he was so far away from home right now that it wasn't even funny.

The reason he was here in this bright snowy waste was because the world needed a hero. Not his sort of hero though. Not one that lurked in the shadows creating fear. What the world needed right now was a hero who could stand in the light creating hope. An example to look up to and follow.

Determined to bring the world that hero, he continued forward despite the chill of the Arctic ice that was seeping into his bones. He didn't really have much further to go anyway, because his destination now stood before him, the deceptively cold sunlight turning it into a dazzling crystal palace. It was a thing of beauty that stood out from the stark whiteness of its surroundings throwing out rainbows from every surface. This beautiful sight before him wasn't a palace however, but a fortress that stood alone at the center of a no-fly zone. Inviolate. Visitors not welcome. A true fortress of solitude which was occupied by one individual, the person with whom he'd come to talk.

After another hour's walking, he found himself at the threshold of the fortress that had not been visited by any but its owner for years. Though the door seemed open, that was most likely not the case. Too many had tried to break into this place both while it was occupied and while its occupant was away for one to believe that the seemingly open space that served as an entrance wasn't closed in some way that wasn't visible to the naked eye. Some who had tried to enter over the years as he was doing now had succeeded, but most had failed. He was counting on the...man's former friendship with his great-grandfather in order to get his foot in the door.

After checking for obvious traps which he would have to disarm, and hoping that he didn't set off any not-so-obvious Kryptonian ones which he would have little to no defense against, he set one foot over the threshold, and then another when an explosion failed to happen. When an explosion failed to happen the second he'd gotten both feet over the threshold, he continued walking. As he made his way through the fortress, watchful for traps along the way despite the fact that it looked like he'd been given permission to enter and have his audience with the Man of Steel, he noted that the place wasn't what he had been expecting.

He didn't know what he'd really been expecting though. The fortress his grandfather had spoken of visiting perhaps. A museum containing artifacts that were related to the life of its occupant had also come up when trying to picture the place where he currently strongly felt like an intruder. Some of his more outrageous musings had even involved an old person's home complete with pictures of loved ones and little knick-knacks scattered about. All of them had seemed potentially possible for the being who had hit his century mark several years earlier that occupied this fortress that lived up to the name of The Fortress of Solitude.

Whatever he'd been expecting though, it wasn't this.

The place was stark, white, utterly devoid of decoration, and just as cold as the outside, though it felt colder somehow. There was also a pervasive sense of being watched, measured, assessed, and found lacking in some way.

Between one second and the next, as his guard was beginning to drop due to a lack of immediate danger, he suddenly went from being alone to finding himself standing in front of Superman. Or rather, finding Superman who hadn't been there a moment before standing before him.

The suit Superman wore hadn't changed all that much over the last seven and a half decades, but the occupant...

Though the being wearing the iconic suit looked human on the surface, there was no mistaking him for a human being. The being's eyes and expression were flat, cold, and utterly alien. Although his face was as ageless and unlined as it had been in the photographs in the family album, it was completely unlike the way it had been in those old pictures he used to leaf through when he was young. Not in the physical sense. The black hair, blue eyes, and strong jaw were completely unchanged; but unlike in those old pictures, there was no sign of anything even remotely human about Superman's face. There was no sign of the laughter, good humor, and occasional mischief he'd spotted in the old photographs from his grandfather's and great-grandfather's day. There was no sign of a man who would pull the occasional good-natured prank on a boy who was too full of himself. There was...Nothing.

Steeling his nerves, he reminded himself why he had come.

"Superman, we need to talk." he said.

"So, talk." Superman replied in a voice that was devoid of any inflection.

**Edited 9-1-16**


	2. Superman Comes In From the Cold

Gotham city was as dark, crowded, and as noisy as it had ever been. If he hadn't seen evidence otherwise, he would've believed that the city was perpetually covered in grey storm clouds when it wasn't nighttime. Even on sunny days, the daylight seemed off in this place. The buildings in the downtown area were modern steel and glass towers, much like in any major city and many others that aspire to be major cities. Unlike nearby Metropolis where designs were lighter, more open, and seemed to reflect sunlight everywhere, the architects of Metropolis' seemingly evil twin had subconsciously made the buildings fit in with the ancient darkness that had seemed to cling to Gotham since its founding. As a result of this, Gotham's downtown was a monument to shining black Neogothic architecture.

Located in Gotham's teeming downtown, The Gotham Ledger, which was his destination and future place of employment, was smaller and lesser-known competition to the Gotham Gazette. Rather than having practically an entire building to itself the way the Daily Planet had when he'd worked there, the Ledger was crammed in with several businesses in one of the buildings near the Financial district. The newspaper's offices took up most of the space on two of the middle floors of the building and the entire basement where printing presses churned out an amazing number of papers day in and day out. The rest of the building was the domain of the other businesses that rented space there, including two doctors and a dentist.

As he looked up at the building in which the Ledger was located, Superman readjusted his tie wondering for the millionth time exactly why he'd allowed the brat in the bat parka to talk him into this. He hadn't worn a suit and tie since he'd killed Clark Kent off in 1968. By that point, he'd lingered far too long and people had routinely been commenting about the fact that he hadn't aged all that much since the '40s. Make-up would've been fine for on stage or in front of a camera, but it wouldn't cut it up close and in person. Especially since his hair was impervious to dye. Both of the children had been grown and on their own at that point, so it had become safe to leave.

He hadn't really had all that much reason to stay in the role of Clark Kent for years by the time he'd left. The only reason he hadn't killed off Clark Kent right after Lois had died of an aneurysm in '62 had been because she'd left him with the pair of half grown children that they had adopted following their marriage and subsequent discovery that having children of their own was out of the question. Children he hadn't really known how to deal with without Lois around to be a combination mother, referee, peacekeeper, occasionally the bad guy when he'd yet again been too permissive, and occasionally the good guy when he'd yet again been a bit too harsh or had forbidden the wrong thing. Lois's death had been a surprisingly quiet death considering. Just a few complaints about a bad headache which he'd rather stupidly given her aspirin for rather than searching for a cause, and suddenly, while he'd been typing away at the next desk over, he'd heard her heart stutter and then stop. He'd turned around to find her slumped over at her desk, a page from a half-complete story resting in her typewriter, never to be finished.

Perry had passed before Lois, having had had one too many heart attacks in '59, and in '65, Jimmy Olsen had gone in a car crash while he'd been busy putting out a fire on an oil tanker. While he'd been dealing with the fire in a manner that would have had Environmental groups up in arms if he tried it in this day and age, Jimmy's car had skidded on a patch of road that was slick due to it being the first rain of the season and plowed into a truck carrying produce. Both drivers had been killed immediately. As for Bruce, the ancestor of the brat in the bat parka who'd persuaded him to go through with this charade, decades of hard living had taken their toll on him. One day, he'd completely misjudged his physical capabilities, thinking himself to be as strong as he had been the year before, and didn't make a jump. Fortunately, his son hadn't been there to see it.

He'd blamed himself for all of those deaths but Perry's for a while, until he'd stopped. It wasn't that he'd finally convinced himself that Lois's death wasn't his fault, since the headache was a sign of an already burst aneurysm, and there had not really been anything he could've done for Jimmy and Bruce since he hadn't known that they would die while he was elsewhere. He'd just simply stopped blaming himself around the time a number of other things had quietly vanished from him. Things that the brat in the bat parka wanted him to bring back.

He'd known for years following Clark Kent's death and his subsequent departure to the North Pole that his connection to the humans who'd adopted him and he'd adopted in return was constantly slipping away, and that his self-imposed isolation in the Fortress of Solitude wasn't doing him any favors. But, after a while, he'd stopped caring. That didn't mean that he'd stopped saving people. Never that, he'd never do that. But, he'd stopped caring about all of the little things that a human might care about. He'd stopped lingering to see the results of the good he'd done afterward like he used to. He stopped almost reveling in the feeling of pride and accomplishment that followed a difficult but successful rescue. He stopped going into towns and cities and doing mundane things like buying a pastry and snacking on it as he read a book or magazine at a humanly slow pace, and almost completely stopped interacting with humans outside of situations that were directly related to rescues altogether.

For the last four decades and change, he'd been Superman the hero from Krypton and nothing else.

The brat in the bat parka had said that he'd become frozen like the wasteland he was living in, which was strange coming from Batman who was almost as dark as the shadows he lurked in. But, then again, the brat in the bat parka wasn't Bruce. For the brat in the bat parka, the cape and the cowl was family tradition. A payment toward the obligation the family owed the city that had been good to them and made them wealthy long before. For the brat in the bat parka, being Batman was not a hard-fought crusade against the crime that had been plaguing Gotham which had been germinated when a child had seen his parents be murdered right in front of him.

Crime still plagued Gotham, providing a frequent challenge to this current generation's Batman as it did the one the generation previous etc., but not to the level and degree it had back in the olden days. Compared to the Crime-ridden Gotham of old, the current Gotham was practically a peaceful paradise. While there was still the occasional escape from Arkham, security was far better than it had been back in Bruce's day and the prisoners stayed put for the most part. Most of the crime in the city was either gang related, or of the petty sort.

When this generation's version of Batman had shown up at the Fortress after having spent a long time steeling himself for the confrontation while he was out on the ice, he'd initially planned on letting the brat in the bat parka say his piece and then leave with the situation unchanged. He didn't believe there was anything that could be said that would make him start wanting to care again. People, better people than the bat brat, had tried and given up long before. The brat had stood there passionately arguing about how the world needed a man who was more than forty-five years dead, and how he needed to be that man at least some of the time. Completely unmoved, he'd stood there coldly and logically shooting down every argument until the words that had come like a slap to the face.

"How can you still call yourself a hero when all you do is just spin your wheels despite the fact that there's far more that you are capable of beyond simply rescuing people from immediate peril? How can you provide the world an example to look up to like you claim your father - both of your fathers - wanted when all they see is a burnout who's just been going through the motions for decades?" the bat brat had passionately yelled after hours of frustration. He still didn't know why those words stung so much when his heart and his humanity as it were had died for the most part when those who had been closest to him had passed. Perhaps it was the reminder of a duty going long unfulfilled, but it seemed deeper than that. In the end, those words were the only reason why he'd agreed to go through with the brat's insane plan, despite the fact that he knew it would just bring him more pain in the long run when he started caring again and his new friends died on him like his previous friends and family had done.

Considering the fact that he could ask for a new name with which he could set up a human identity with which to reconnect with the world, he still didn't know why he'd taken the papers and the wallet that identified him as Clark Jerome Kent, formerly of Kansas City, Kansas, son of Johnathan and Martha Kent born 2-29-84 and agreed that he would start work on Monday. The fact that it was a familiar name that he would immediately answer to couldn't have been all of it, as he'd gone by aliases without looking like he was trying to figure out who someone was calling when they were calling out his fake name before. Part of him had wanted to throw the papers identifying him as Clark Kent back in the bat brat's face and tell him to get lost because that man was long dead and buried and going by that name felt wrong to him somehow. Part of him simply accepted that identity as his at a level that was bone deep. Whether both parts were something that had remained after his humanity had leached away or the beginnings of a newly resurging humanness, he didn't know. Either way, whether this was a good thing or not remained to be seen.

He'd nearly changed his mind a million times since he'd agreed to at the very least try to go along with the brat's plan, and yet, here he was standing around in a business suit headed to his first day of work at the one job Clark Kent was qualified for. The job he'd initially gotten back in the 1930s because, aside from the Police and the Government, there was one other profession that tried to find out what was happening when it was happening and be first on the scene. The job that had allowed him to be frequently absent without explanation so long as he had something to show his boss when he returned.

After wavering on the issue so often, the only reason he was here right now was because he'd told himself that it would be very temporary, since he seriously doubted that people would be fooled by glasses, a slouch, a slightly different walk, a change in the pitch of his voice, him parting his hair in the opposite direction, and a false clumsiness in this day and age. He'd just simply have to try and reconnect with the human race as Clark Kent to see if it would go anywhere near where the brat in the bat parka wanted to go until someone finally figured out what was going on and raised the alarm. When he was inevitable discovered as all logic said he should be, he'd wait a while for the circus to die down and then he'd go back to the way things were. He'd go back to living a quiet life where he wouldn't be bothered and wouldn't worry exactly when the person he's talking to is going to die on him, because the person he was talking to was a stranger.

Realizing that he'd been stalling outside the building he should currently be inside for far too long and that he was beginning to attract notice, he started moving towards the door again. The Gotham Ledger was no Daily Planet, but since it was owned by the Waynes, he'd been guaranteed a job in an age when everyone was downsizing due to that internet thing which was looking to be a bit more permanent than the latest craze he'd thought it to be. He'd been guaranteed a job that should've gone to someone else, since he was only taking it at the brat's request because the brat had thought that having work outside of rescuing people was the best way for him to reconnect with people and be the example he used to be, and apparently no-longer was. He'd been guaranteed a job that he was probably going to be edged out of by some "Blogger" in a few years, so long as that whole "Blogging" thing didn't prove to be the fad that the internet wasn't.

Despite his isolation, he wasn't ignorant of modern society. He'd have to be willfully blind and deaf and probably even have to block his nose to be that. It was just that he never knew what would just be the latest craze, and what would stay a while. Things he'd previously thought would be permanent, enduring, all too often proved not to be, and he'd found himself standing there staring at shuttered doors where there had once been something that had stood for nearly as long as if not longer than his hundred and six years. Nowadays, he just let it all pass over him like water over a duck's back. A little might stick here and there, but the vast majority wouldn't.

As he made his way into the building that housed his temporary new workplace, he caught sight of a very public display of affection in the lobby. The couple in question were kissing rather passionately for such a public venue, and he was somewhat disturbed by this latest display of the loose morals and easy promiscuity of this day and age. But, then again, his parents had railed against the lack of morals and open promiscuity of the Roaring 20s. While he'd come of age in the then fast decade that had gone out with one hell of a bang when the bottom dropped of the stock market, he hadn't "become a man" back then, preferring to follow his adoptive father's advice and wait rather than risk catching something from a prostitute or risk getting Lana or another girl into trouble. There had been a few raised eyebrows upon discovery of this fact before he'd married Lois, but none of the comments he would've received in this day and age where doing such with a similarly aged partner well before the age of eighteen seemed to practically be a requirement in American society.

Despite the fact that he was trying to feel something so he could fall back into the role of Clark Kent which had once come so very easily to him, he found that he was still far too apathetic to drum up any of the socially ingrained disgust he would've once felt over the fact that both members of the kissing couple were male. Instead, he passed the couple without giving them a second glance or making a sound as he made his way to where his new boss, someone named Gabrielle Watkins, was waiting.

When he reached the office his new Editor in Chief occupied, the woman's expression turned to shocked surprise when she caught sight of him. "You look very..." the woman started before snapping her teeth down over the next word, which he was reasonably certain would be "human", before it could be spoken.

"Well," she continued, pretending she hadn't been surprised by him and his appearance. "I have been briefed on the situation by Mr. Wayne, and you will be shadowing Eric Hernandez until you get on your feet, after which point you will be partnered with him. I am aware of your other job 'Mr. Kent', and I will warn you here and now that if I catch you slacking off for reasons other than your other work, I will treat you like any of my other employees."

"Understood." he replied, noting that the woman had some steel under her almost matronly exterior.

"If you need help with learning how to use the computers, Jason Lee will be happy to help you." Gabrielle said, before calling his future partner and getting his voicemail on which she'd left a curt message, and calling and the Lee boy in.

Jason Lee proved to be a redheaded brat who was cut from similar cloth as Jimmy Olsen, and was probably related considering the resemblance. There wasn't a camera in his hand or hanging around his neck the way there would've been with Jimmy however. The kid who couldn't have been older than twenty was carrying a smartphone on which he was texting someone, having apparently mastered the art of navigating without looking at his surroundings, seeing as he hadn't once looked up as he made his way into the office. Considering how expensive smartphones were to replace when broken, the kid would have to be a master of the ancient art of reading while walking. Either that, or made of money.

A well meaning police department had given him an iPhone a couple years back and had taught him how to use it. But, it had proven completely useless for their purposes, seeing as he often flew to places where it didn't get any reception. Despite the fact that he'd tucked it in his belt and therefore as close to his skin as he could get it without putting it in his clothing, it had ended up being destroyed in under a week. Upon finding out how much it would cost to replace the thing, he'd decided against getting one of his own, or asking for another one.

"I was told you'd need help with the computers." the Lee boy said when he finished sending his text and finally looked up.

"I just need to get my account set up, and familiarize myself with your network." he replied. He could hear Gabrielle's eyebrows raise behind him, and wondered what it was about that statement that was so surprising. Considering one or two of his recent rescues, they should've realized that he was familiar with computers. But, then again, from what he'd overheard over the years, he'd gathered that people tended to think he was all brawn and superpowers and generally ignored the evidence that he actually had a brain. While he didn't use them often, and didn't keep one in the Fortress, he'd been very capable in the use of computers ever since an annoying and rather condescending technical whiz-kid had given him a crash course back in the '90s. The look on the kid's face when he'd come back for another "lesson" a week later and hacked NASA's administrative network in front of the smart alec had almost been amusing at the time.

Following a dismissal from his Editor in Chief who looked and dressed the way one would picture a modern grandmother dressing, aside from the bottle blonde hair and the vibrantly red nails, the Lee boy led him to the desk which had been assigned to him. It was as he was getting his password set up and logging into the Ledger's system for the first time that his new partner arrived to introduce himself.

Eric Hernandez was a skinny, conservatively dressed man of about six feet in height who had dark brown hair that was lightly peppered with grey, medium brown eyes, tan skin, and just so happened to be one of the men he'd spotted kissing in the lobby when he'd arrived.

He was pretty certain that making Hernandez his partner at the Ledger had been a deliberate move on his new Editor in Chief's part, though what her motive was, he wasn't quite sure.

**Edited. 9-1-16.**


	3. Pushed Back on the Bicycle

Superman put his questions regarding Gabrielle Watkins' motives regarding the assignment of his new partner aside as he introduced himself to the man who was clearly an experienced journalist if he was reading his visual cues correctly. Though he was half expecting it, there was no ironic expression of "_Sure you are_" on Eric Hernandez's face when he'd introduced himself to the man as Clark Kent, just as there had been no such expression on Jason Lee's while the boy had been helping him get set up, indicating that it was only the Editor in Chief who had been briefed on the exact nature of his other identity. Throughout their introductions to each-other which had gone through without the revelation that Superman was standing in the office "playing journalist" being made to the general public, Hernandez had remained at a polite distance from him and didn't give him more than the sort of generally appraising look one would give any reasonably attractive person. Since the man was being completely professional, unlike the rather large number of members of both sexes he'd had to fend off over the years, he decided that so long as his partner kept things professional and didn't attempt to pursue him, he could very easily keep silent regarding his old opinions on certain "lifestyle choices" which at the moment he couldn't really bring himself to give a damn about, but might end up doing later if the Bat brat got what he wanted.

After introducing himself, Hernandez had made some attempts at small talk in an apparent attempt to sound out his new trainee/future work partner, and get a handle on his character. As Hernandez asked where he'd gotten his "retro" tie which the other man found to be cool, he idly noted that his new Editor in Chief was standing in the doorway of her office watching the exchange like a hawk. He didn't know what she expected or wanted to see, but based on her expression, she clearly wasn't seeing it. Considering their recent meeting, it was entirely possible that the woman was looking for a legitimate excuse to fire him, and him failing to get along with Hernandez or saying something inappropriate about the man's homosexuality, especially to his face, would provide her with that excuse.

In his younger years after he first took up the cape, back when he'd stopped being the farmboy and wasn't certain whether he was Superman or the Journalist who used his job as a means to find out where Superman needed to be to do the most good but also did good with and rather liked his job as a journalist, he'd done his best to keep quiet about his opinions on matters such as race, religion, and a woman's place in society when he wore the suit. Back then, he chose to rescue whoever needed rescuing, never passing judgement on those he saved. Instead, he'd reserved his judgement for those who would harm the innocent, enemy combatants, and those who guarded enemy assets. So, it wasn't like he was unfamiliar with the concept of keeping silent regarding something he didn't agree with or believe in, and he damn well knew the line between something that could alienate a co-worker and something that could get him fired on his first day on the job. Seeing as he wasn't so utterly unprofessional as to get himself fired on his first day...

Seeing as his new Editor in Chief had put him in training under Hernandez, never brought up his prior history as a journalist nor shown or any acknowledgment of his prior experience in the field, and hadn't shown an iota of the awe a journalist would've shown for someone they would've undoubtedly read about while studying for a degree in Journalism upon running into said person, he could reasonably assume that Gabrielle had only been briefed on the fact that he was Superman and not on the fact that he was That Clark Kent. In that light, he could understand why his new boss would want to fire him, considering the fact that he was taking up space that should've belonged to someone who had a degree that wasn't eighty years old which the Editor in Chief could verify existed and wasn't a Wayne created forgery like his identification was. After all, the woman had to know that all of his paperwork was forged by the Waynes who'd ordered her to hire him in the first place, and she had no reason to not believe that all of his other qualifications were forged as well.

The thing was, his qualifications weren't so much created out of thin air using the occasional name from his past like the rest of the history that had been created for him was as re-dated, since they were nearly fifty years out of date. His Journalism degree was over eighty years old, and his last job in the field had ended forty-five years before when he'd killed off Clark Kent.

While pondering the issue and his new boss' reasons for wanting to fire him, old journalistic instincts that had long since gone dormant began actually wondering what his new Editor in Chief thought about one of the Waynes throwing his weight around and hiring Superman himself for a job that appeared to be well outside of the superhero's skill set from a human interest angle. That part of his mind which he hadn't used in years, that part of his mind that had belonged to the reporter he once was, then started analyzing the situation as if it were one of his stories, looking for the right angle to go at it from. Within seconds, that part of his mind, which had been quiet for ages, was already drafting the "Alfred Wayne Hires Superman as a Reporter!" article, and slipping in appropriately ironic quotes about how ill-suited someone who flew around lifting heavy objects and setting things on fire with eye lasers was for such a job.

He was rapidly pulled out of his article drafting when his new partner informed him that if they didn't get a move on, they'd be late for the Gotham City Ferret Show.

"Ferret show?" he asked, having never heard of such a thing, even in his accidental eavesdropping on the world which he usually tried to tune out while he focused on more important matters such as where he needed to be next, but couldn't help but overhear when he was out on rescues.

"It's sort of like a dog show, but with ferrets." Hernandez replied. "Since you're a newbie and I'm still recovering from last month's stabbing, Gabrielle decided to put us on the show and convention circuit."

"Stabbing?" he asked, mainly because it was the human thing to do, and Clark would've asked. As far as Superman was concerned, seeing as he'd never met Hernandez before in his life, it was just yet another thing that he'd missed while his attention was focused elsewhere. Considering the fact that the world wasn't a Utopian society where everybody tolerated everybody else and their life choices, he could easily guess why Hernandez got stabbed without asking.

"A bondage club that was into more than bondage didn't like the expose I did on them." Hernandez replied with a shrug of his shoulders, surprising him, because he'd been expecting something else entirely. "Considering the fact that they don't usually pair a newbie that nobody's ever heard of with an experienced investigative reporter, I'm guessing that Gabrielle assigned you to me in an attempt to keep me out of trouble."

At that last statement from Hernandez, part of Superman's mind went "Oh, God!". It was just his luck that he'd be paired with another danger magnet like Lois. He'd loved Lois, loved her with his entire heart and soul. But, when she was hot in the pursuit of a good story, she became what was probably one of the most annoying things on the planet: Someone who was completely lacking in any survival instincts whatsoever and completely incapable of spotting danger. Since she had been utterly incapable of keeping herself out of danger for five minutes when she was hot on the trail of one of her front-page, above the fold with three inch tall headlines stories, he had constantly been forced to rescue her several times in a row as he attempted to deal with the situation she'd uncovered and/or gotten herself involved in. Bruce had often wondered what he'd seen in Lois, considering the fact that she often seemed too stupid to live. But, his wife had had many sterling qualities, including the fact that she was dangerously competent when she wasn't in mortal danger and was frequently an intellectual match for him.

Considering the fact that his new boss knew that he had constantly played rescuer to Lois Lane, as such rescues had ended up in the papers on what was practically a weekly basis, it was entirely possible that he'd been given the Gotham Ledger's danger magnet for a reason other than his potential first-day firing. It would be a practical move to use the superhero who was "Playing reporter" as a superpowered babysitter for a reporter who was both actually worth something, and incapable of staying out of danger. If that was indeed the case, it would seem that he'd completely underestimated Ms Watkins.

Riding to the ferret show in an actual car rather than flying there - doing three rescues, buying a bagel on the way and still arriving before his partner - the way he used to do with Lois was a trial in patience. He'd tried to split up and go his usual way, but his new partner had insisted they come together. Apparently, this was so the man could get to know him and set some ground rules and a few boundaries in regards to their work relationship. Not caring to get in an argument, he'd followed Hernandez down to the parking garage where the man led him to a rather plain looking sedan. The car was neither new, nor old enough to qualify as a classic. It was one of those not too clean nor too dirty vehicles that were kept around and duly repaired rather than replaced because they'd become something like the family pet. Despite the number of dents and scratches the vehicle possessed, Hernandez was rather slow, careful, and methodical for a city driver.

As he sat in the passenger seat of Hernandez's car, he received the "I'm your superior because I have seniority, therefore what I say goes" speech, and the "If you try to steal my work, they won't find the body" speech, as well as the "If you try to steal my office supplies, I will gut you" speech. Lois's versions of all three speeches which she had given him when he'd first arrived at the Planet and been assigned as her partner nearly eighty years before had been far more intimidating, even with their complete lack of profanity and graphic depictions of violence. Part of the reason for that may have been because Lois was fully capable of succeeding in a cutthroat environment that had been considered a man's world back then. In those days, a woman had to be nearly ten times as good as a man with the exact same job title, and the men knew it.

The ferret show had started off rather mundanely, and had looked to be a rather boring start to a boring first day out. Being press, they had been rather warmly welcomed by the ferret owning crowd which had been happy to show their prized pets off to a pair of reporters, even if the medium said reporters worked in was print. Since he was trying to behave as Clark Kent would've done, he duly complimented each smelly animal that was practically shoved under his nose and inquisitively asked the owners, the judges, and the hosts of the event every question Clark would've asked. There was one moment when he figured he must've made a mistake somewhere due to the watchful and somewhat negative reaction he'd received.

What was so wrong with spending five minutes interviewing an eight year-old girl, complimenting her pet, and patting her on the head before moving on to interview someone else? He knew there'd been any number of pedophile scares in recent years, and he had actually dealt with a number of such creatures over his decades as Superman, but seriously? He'd sooner gnaw his own arm off than touch a kid _that_ way.

It had been while he'd been very, very, very carefully handling an oddly colored version of one of the smelly little creatures he'd come to see and complimenting it the way that Clark would've that he realized that Hernandez, who'd previously been working the other side of the room, was gone. A quick look around with his x-ray vision since he wasn't quite yet attuned to the man's voice revealed that the man had pulled a Lois and found the only bit of real danger for miles. This bit of danger involved a couple of men with guns and what looked like drugs being smuggled in ferret carriers.

After a quick excuse that involved having to use the bathroom and a quick disappearance, Superman was soon on the scene, Hernandez was safe, and a pair of armed idiots were in the custody of police officers who seemed confused as to what the hell Superman was doing there since he'd usually left the small stuff to them, and Gotham was Batman's territory.

After they'd gotten back to the Ledger, Gabrielle Watkins took one look at the first story submitted under the Eric Hernandez and Clark Kent byline and sighed "I sent you out to do a human interest piece about tube rats, and you run into a drug smuggling ring. Only you Eric, only you..."

Seeing Watkins' long-suffering expression, he remembered that twinge of pity he used to feel for Perry every time Lois had done the same thing. Somehow, he didn't think this was a coincidence.

Apparently, a certain someone had thought the best way to get him to reconnect with humanity was to stick him in a familiar situation and get him to swing back into things like a man riding a bicycle for the first time in years.

That brat in the bat parka was going to pay.

* * *

A woman who was pushing seventy stared at the newspaper in her hand. Though the name was most likely a coincidence since there were plenty of Kents out there and at least one of them - possibly a Clark Gable fan or even one of the few remaining Clark Kent fans - was going to name his son Clark, part of her mind still screamed "Daddy!" with childish glee when she caught sight of it. If it was really...If it was really him, she didn't know how she felt about it. She'd always known that she was adopted, and therefore not really his. Not that he was a bad father or anything, just frequently absent when he was there, and after he'd left and didn't come back...It wasn't like she, her children, and the grandchildren were really related to him...

Still though, she had wished that the man who'd raised her, the man she'd called father, would come back if only just once every day since he'd left.

* * *

**Omake:**

"What the...?! Again?"

"Well, that's more creative than his usual..."

"Why can't Superman find some other government agency to hack when he's bored?"

"Probably because we don't send armed agents to his house every time he does?"

**Omake 2:**

"I need to go iron my dog." he said, not even bothering to come up with a believable excuse for why he was leaving. Considering the fact that he'd used that excuse at the Planet twice during the Fifties and gotten away with it, it was apparently good enough.

"I know I've heard that before somewhere..." Jason Lee said before clicking on the search function on his internet browser and typing in the strange excuse that Clark Kent, who half the office was betting was not-so-secretly an axe murderer, had made before departing.

"Oh shit, TVTropes! We're not going to see Jason for a week..." Eric said when he glanced over the young intern's shoulder and saw the result that came up.

**Edited 9-1-16.**


	4. Clark Kent and Clark Kent

Eric Hernandez studied his new trainee/future work partner. It was their second day together, and he didn't know what to make of the man, which was odd because he was usually able to accurately peg people within an hour of meeting them. There was something about the newbie Gabrielle had saddled him with that was so completely off that it gave everyone who'd run into him so far the creeps. Sure, Kent said and did all the right things, but there was a certain emptiness behind it all that made him wonder if Waynetech wasn't testing out a new android or something. That whole Uncanny Valley thing was in full effect with this guy. Either Waynetech was using the Ledger as a testing ground for a new android, or Jason's theory that the man was a serial killer was spot on.

The problem with Jason's theory however, was that Kent wasn't superficially charming the way your average sociopath/psychopath in hiding was. He was far too cold to put people off their guard the way an apex predator who used human society as its hunting ground would need to in order to survive uncaught.

On the surface, the man was attractive and well dressed with a flair for retro and vintage clothing, and the thick framed, horn-rimmed glasses did little to hide his handsome Superman lookalike looks. Beneath the surface however, aside from that one flash of anger that didn't seem to have been directed at him or Gabrielle which he'd caught the day before, there didn't seem to be anything but ice. As to whether the man was straight or gay, he couldn't even begin to guess. His new work partner hadn't shown any attraction whatsoever when a rather beautiful woman had practically thrown herself at him the previous afternoon following the Ferret show debacle which had earned him another front page above the fold article due to the fact that he'd spotted a known drug dealer at the show and decided to follow him. But, then again, Kent hadn't shown even the least bit of interest when Tom had made a pass at him either, and Tom was a very attractive man.

Despite the fact that Tom had a bit of a roving eye at times, Eric dearly loved him and knew full well that despite all of his husband's flirting with other men, it was him that Tom had married, and him that Tom came home to at night. Sure, the flirting could get annoying at times, and had started a number of arguments when it had crossed an unspoken line both men knew was there, but Eric knew that things would all work out at the end of the day, or the end of the week at worst, and things would be as right as they could be between them.

Looking at Kent's completely orderly workspace, Eric could see that there were no personal items on the newbie's desk aside from a few basic office supplies that looked like they'd been purchased the night before. But, then again, it was only Kent's second day on the job, and it was possible that the man wasn't yet comfortable enough to start personalizing his workspace with little things like family photos, stickers, and little troll dolls sporting hair in the color of one's favorite sports team.

Speaking of favorite sports teams...

"What's your favorite team?" he asked his partner who was intently glaring at the computer in front of him and occasionally clicking the mouse that his hand practically hovered over as he navigated from page to page in an attempt to learn at least something about the man that he would be working with for the foreseeable future.

"Which sport?" Kent asked, not looking up from whatever it was he was doing.

"Pick one." he said.

"The Metropolis Monarchs" Kent said after a moment of thought, still not looking up from his computer screen.

_Odd._ Eric thought. One would've thought that, since Kent was from Kansas City according to the half-complete profile the man had put up on the Ledger's website, that his favorite baseball team would've been the Royals. Then again, Kent had gotten his Journalism degree from Met U, which was setting all sorts of alarm bells ringing in his mind for some strange reason. Something to do with his own time in school, which was strange considering the fact that Kent was a good decade and a half younger than him.

Typing Clark Kent's name into his favorite search engine, he came up with a Facebook page and an old inactive Myspace page that obviously belonged to the newbie, a link to the Daily Planet archives, and a Kent family tree on which Clark Kent 1908-1968, adopted son of Johnathan Kent 1849-1932 and Martha Clark 1852-1933, was married to one Lois Lane 1909-1962 with whom he'd adopted two children Margaret Kent-Thompson (Still Living) and Christopher Kent (Still Living) and had one natural child named John Nathan Kent 1947-1999 who'd married one Martha Clarke 1956-2010 with whom they'd had a son they'd named Clark (Still Living).

Going back over the links, he found himself realizing exactly why the name Clark Kent in association with Metropolis had triggered a memory, and realizing that the Kent that was sitting in front of him was just the grandson of the Kent he'd learned about when he was getting his Journalism degree. Reassured by this revelation, the alarm bells that had been ringing in a small corner of the back of his mind quieted down. Clicking on the picture of the original Clark Kent who'd been one half of the famous Clark Kent and Lois Lane duo who had dominated the reporting field during the middle of the last century, he found himself looking at a slightly blurry image of a handsome Superman lookalike type in thick framed, horn-rimmed glasses.

Damned if the family resemblance wasn't downright creepy.

Honestly, the only difference between the two men was that the man in the picture with the faint smile and the glint of mischief in the eyes nearly hidden by those atrocious glasses actually looked human.

* * *

"G.G.! G.G.! Look! I found a family tree!" Christopher Kent's great-grandson who'd been given the task of drawing up a family tree by a genealogy obsessed teacher yelled from the living-room where he'd been playing around with the computer Christopher had gotten a while back on a whim.

Christopher smiled once again at the unknowing and unintentional but entirely fitting linguistic joke that was his descendant's slightly disrespectful nickname for him as he headed to look at the family tree that his son's son's son had found. The really amusing part of the nickname his descendant had graced him with was that his thoroughly American nine year-old great-grandson hadn't done it deliberately when he'd come up with it.

After his usual chuckle over the nickname which sounded like "Jiji" which was a slightly disrespectful term for an old man, he headed over to the room where his great-grandson was still excitedly calling for him. Looking over Michael's shoulder at the computer monitor when he reached him, he saw that there was indeed a family tree on the screen, a Kent family tree. A somewhat inaccurate Kent family tree. Exactly what the author of this tree had thought they were doing when they'd tacked on an extra Johnathan and Martha and an extra Clark, he didn't know.

Aside from the fact that there had been no little brother named "John Nathan" in the house when he was growing up, he knew full well that his parents couldn't have a natural child of their own, which was why they had adopted him and Margaret. Adopting a Japanese child, even an American-born Japanese who didn't pick up any of the language until Vietnam and who had considered America to be his home, so soon after the War hadn't done the Kents any favors. Even twenty years after the ill thought out adoption, there had been some nasty comments bandied around the neighborhood that weren't solely directed at him. His sister Margaret, who was perfectly Caucasian and an All-American girl, had even borne the brunt of some of the hatred towards him and the people who had dared adopt him and bring him into their neighborhood.

Typing in the name Clark Kent into a search engine in order to investigate this anomaly, he found a Facebook page and a Myspace page. Clicking on the link to the Facebook page, he found himself looking at a picture of the frequently absent man who'd raised him as his own, not caring what other people said about the fact that he'd done so. The man who'd almost completely shut down after his mother's death and completely disappeared from his life as soon as he was grown up and out of the house.

From what he could see of the picture, it was an old one which had been photoshopped to look like it was modern. He had not seen an expression like that on his father's face since before his mother had died. His father had blamed himself for what had happened every day since his mother's death, even though it wasn't his fault and there was nothing he really could've done. While he may have had the powers of a god, his father didn't have the omniscient mind of one. Even if he had thought to look the minute his mother had started complaining about a headache, it would've already been too late. The headache his mother had complained of that day when she'd died at her desk had been a sign of an already ruptured aneurysm.

For many years, he'd considered October 12, 1968 to be the day his father had truly died. After all, after that date, Clark Kent had been completely gone from the world. Superman may have still been around, but he hadn't been the one who'd raised him. Superman had kept his distance in order to keep people from mentally associating him with Margaret and himself. Clark Kent had been the one who'd been around when he was. Clark Kent had been the one to at least try to take five minutes to play catch with him. Superman had been someone else entirely, someone who had fully taken over the body of Clark Kent on that cold day in October when the police had turned up at the door and informed him that his father was missing, almost certainly dead, and that it would only be a matter of time until they found the body.

Picking up the phone without even really thinking about it, he dialed a number. After three rings, he got an answer.

"Margaret," he said to the woman he usually only talked to around Christmastime "It would seem that our father has finally decided to return to the land of the living."

As he listened to Margaret's stunned breathing, he found himself wondering why. Why after all this time, and why now when he and Margaret were nearly at the end of their lives? Why did dad return now and not when his grandchildren were born, or when his grandchildren were growing up, or when his grandchildren were grown and giving him great-grandchildren, or when the great-grandchildren were growing up, or when the great-grandchildren were grown, married, and giving him great-great grandchildren like Michael who was looking at him as if he thought his great-grandfather had just gone senile?

Why, and why now?

* * *

Gabrielle watched as the White Elephant that Alfred Wayne had hired as some sort of bizarre social experiment excused himself to use the restroom for the third time that day. How he managed to get any of his work here done, much less submit an article under his own byline in-between all the rescues he was running, she didn't know. She'd read over the article twice after he submitted it, and though it didn't seem like Eric's writing style...

She scowled slightly at the name on the byline on the surprisingly well-written article. Clark Kent was a name that came up frequently back when she was in Journalism school. One of her professors had been a big fan of the man who'd been one half of the greatest pair of investigative reporters that the Daily Planet had ever seen before or since. The pair of reporters who had practically defined the term Investigative Reporter for an entire generation. Naming Superman Clark Kent had obviously been Alfred Wayne's idea of a joke, and she found it to be rather disrespectful of the real Clark Kent who had died trying to expose a human trafficking ring that had been operating on the Eastern seaboard. The real Clark Kent whose death hadn't been in vain despite the fact that nobody had been convicted of his murder, because his death had been the thing that had blown the ring that had been operating right under Superman's nose wide open and had lead to arrests that went all the way to the top levels of Government on two continents.

The real Clark Kent had been a real journalist and an inspiration, not some alien attempting to play human by pretending to be a newspaper reporter like the Kent she'd been saddled with.

Sighing, she called Eric into her office.

"You wanted to see me Gabrielle?" Eric said when he arrived.

"I know you're trying to be nice, but if I catch you writing any of Kent's articles again, there will be consequences." she said, pushing the article towards the man and carefully watching for Eric's usual guilty tells.

"I didn't write that, Kent did." Eric said, looking and sounding completely honest.

"When did he have the time?" she asked, honestly wondering. She'd seen the man at his desk playing with his computer between "potty breaks", but she hadn't seen him typing anything.

"Over our lunch break." Eric replied, looking slightly awed as his mind called up the memory. "He's the fastest damn typist I've ever seen. Hundred words a minute at the very least. The computer almost couldn't keep up with him."

Gabrielle groaned. The last thing she needed was for it to get out that her newspaper had hired Superman. If that ever got out, they'd be the world's biggest laughingstock. Based on this little slip-up by Mr. "It's not a bird, it's not a plane, it's...", odds were that the secret wouldn't last more than a week tops.

**Edited 9-2-16.**


	5. UnConventional

Superman sighed as he pulled on his jacket, mentally preparing himself for the day. Since the furniture had already been delivered, and the cable and internet had already been hooked up, there were no remaining excuses for why he shouldn't stay in the apartment that the brat in the bat parka had secured for him when he'd set up his new identity. Though a large part of him, the part of him that didn't want to be winkled out of the Fortress and shoved back into the world full time didn't want to, he would be "moving" into the apartment today after work.

Alfred Wayne had invested a considerable sum of money in his little scheme to get him to reconnect with the world in order to be the hero he should've been, the hero who led the world along a better path by providing a shining example and appealing to the better natures of all mankind. Obtaining an identity which could stand up to scrutiny that was complete with little things like an internet presence and legitimate excuses for why he'd missed every photo day at school from pre-school to his high school graduation, even if Wayne had to create it himself, couldn't have come cheap. Then there was the apartment, the furniture, the linens, the appliances, the wardrobe, and the advance he'd been given for incidentals until he'd gotten his first paycheck. The brat may have easily been able to throw that large a sum of money at a long shot without thinking about it, may have considered it his civic duty to do so even, but that didn't mean that he wouldn't pay every penny of that money that had been invested in him and this endeavor back somehow.

If the Wayne boy's whole experiment didn't blow up in everybody's faces, he would earn every penny of his paycheck, and just about everything that didn't go towards food, hygiene supplies, and bribing sources for information would be going to Alfred until everything was payed off and he was no longer-beholden to him. If the experiment blew up the way he believed it would eventually do, the way all logic said is should do, most-likely ending in some sort of media circus, he'd find some other way of repaying the brat who'd convinced him that he needed to at least try to reconnect with humanity because Clark Kent had been part of what had made him so great in his younger years. If worst came to worst, he'd completely ignored dropped currency, leaving it for someone else to find and pick up, any number of times. It wouldn't be the first time he'd used that method when he was a little short, though he usually waited until he was completely broke when he did.

After checking himself in the mirror, noting that his appearance was acceptable, and the suit was completely hidden by his over-sized clothes the way it used to be, he stepped out of the Fortress for what could be the last time for a while. There was a time when he wouldn't have been able to fly very fast while wearing his civilian attire, but over the years, that had changed. Now, it was entirely possible that he could wear a circus elephant as a scarf and fly at a speed approaching the speed of light, and it wouldn't get shredded. Not that that mattered, aside from the fact that his clothes wouldn't be the least bit rumpled when he arrived at the Ledger, unless he wanted them to be as part of his Clark Kent persona.

He'd briefly considered going with messy hair as Clark Kent, seeing as it was pretty much considered acceptable for a young man to do in the modern era, but had found himself automatically grabbing his comb and putting it in the style he'd worn it in for decades as Kent on the first day. He knew that after establishing such precedent, he couldn't change to a more modern look without raising comment and unwanted attention over the change for a while at least. If he ever managed to break old habits that was. Either way, his hair didn't really matter all that much at the moment.

What mattered at the moment was getting to work on time, which he did.

Hernandez's greeting for him when he'd arrived for his third day at the Ledger had been "If you were older, I'd suggest that you go and get a prostate exam."

There was a briefly frozen moment following this statement, and an "_Excuse me_?" as he tried to figure out exactly why the man would make such a highly personal comment which could have been taken as innuendo considering.

"You went to the bathroom five times yesterday, and aside from the coffee yesterday morning and that Coke you spat out after the first sip before looking at it like it had personally betrayed you at lunch, I didn't see you drink anything." Hernandez replied, looking at him as if he were slightly worried about him.

Superman, who was still playing Clark because he still couldn't feel Clark aside from one or two Clarkish moments such as the Coke incident, scrambled for an answer. He'd expected to get away with forming a reputation for having a bladder the size of a walnut the way he did a long while back, but now, if Hernandez' reaction was any indication, such things were likely to spark concern over the state of his health rather than jokes. Remembering the fact that the Men's room at the Ledger was the sort with urinals and stalls, rather than those single occupant things that locked when occupied that seemed to have become increasingly popular, he hit on a likely excuse.

"I have a shy bladder." he said, feeling a vague almost Clarkish sense of embarrassment at the excuse. "If there's anyone nearby..."

"Understandable." Hernandez replied with a shrug, apparently deciding to let it go.

With that, both men turned to their desks to check their e-mail. Why Hernandez checked his on his computer when he could do so on his phone, Superman didn't know. It was probably a part of a daily routine that had been established more than a decade prior when such phones didn't exist. Either that, or it was probably to kill time while waiting for a lead on a story he was working on. The reason he himself was checking his own e-mail on his work computer was because he wouldn't have a computer of his own until that evening. Even now, he was limiting himself to his work account rather than the most likely virtually empty personal one that the brat in the bat parka had set up for him. Not everyone at the Ledger was even half as professional as he and Hernandez were. From what he could see during his glance around the room which had a rather open floor plan and marks on the floor from where the walls of cubicles had once rested, several people were watching videos, listening to music, and playing brightly colored games at what were supposed to be workstations.

"I know this is probably going to sound cruel considering, but you should drink more water. Dehydration can lead to some serious health problems." Hernandez said as he clicked on something, probably either opening an e-mail or emptying his Spam folder as he had just done when he'd seen that everything that had been automatically filtered into it had been worthless. The variety of things people would send when they didn't have to pay printing costs or postage in order to distribute them amazed him. Computer viruses, advertisements for everything from pornography to student loans from around the world, pictures of cats on which something that was meant to be amusing had been typed...All of them had appeared in his e-mail, and that wasn't even a thousandth of what could be found on the internet.

"I'll keep that in mind." he replied to Hernandez as he exited his e-mail, opened one of the more popular search engines, searched for the Gotham University website and started fishing around for the internet version of the student message boards. He'd learned long ago that stories could be found in places that many people would find unusual. A few of his stories back when he'd been working at the Planet had come about when he'd done a careful study of the things posted on a student message board back at Met. U. The kids who'd been trying to sell drugs back then apparently hadn't realized that there was nothing new under the sun, and that someone who'd been bootlegging back during his college days had tried something that was virtually identical.

Looking at the site that was set up for the students of Gotham U, he couldn't find anything that looked like a genuine advertisement for the sale of drugs, but he did find what looked like a very serious case of what was called "Cyberbullying". The relative anonymity of the internet gave people the freedom to say things to people online that they would normally never say to another person's face. The opportunity to hide who you are on the internet made things very much like that joke about the General and the Private that ends with the Private asking the General if he knew who he was, the General replying "No", and the Private running off without telling the General who he was. Much of what was said in this anonymous forum where seemingly everybody wore a mask was downright ugly, and that general ugliness which seemed to be seeping out into the real world more and more each passing day occasionally had some very serious real-world consequences.

Knowing that he couldn't defend the young woman who was being targeted in the forum she was being targeted in because he wasn't a student at the university and therefore couldn't get an account with the site, he looked up the Student Counselor, got her e-mail address, and sent her an e-mail alerting her to the problem. That deed done, he started drafting a general article on cyberbullying which seemed to be a relatively hot topic considering the number of times he'd heard the word brought up in recent years, deciding to keep the young woman's name out of it, since he knew that she likely didn't want and wouldn't react well to finding her name in the evening paper.

He turned and found Hernandez standing at his shoulder as he was halfway through the third paragraph of his first draft, which he was typing a bit more slowly than he had the article he'd typed up the day before due to his new Editor in Chief's warnings about his typing speed and her ultimatum that he slow down.

"You know, no-one is going to print that unless something happens." Hernandez said almost regretfully, causing him to pause in his work. "Anyway, Gabrielle has given us an assignment, so we need to go."

On the way down, he tried to split up from Hernandez who was leading him to the spot in the garage where his car was parked again.

"You have your own car?" Hernandez asked, looking rather curious, undoubtedly wondering what kind of car he would drive.

"I prefer to walk." he replied.

"But, the convention center is miles from here!" Hernandez exclaimed.

"And, with how bad traffic is in Gotham, I'll probably arrive before you." he replied, knowing that "probably" was actually "Most definitely", and that he was going to be making at least one rescue on the way.

That, and seeing if there was at least one country in the world where the Coke that he remembered from his younger years hadn't been ruined. What they'd been thinking when they'd tweaked the recipe and put a corn based sweetener in it, he didn't know.

* * *

Eric Hernandez frowned when he got to the convention center only to find the newbie waiting for him. The man who had his press pass clipped to the front of his coat was drinking Coke out of a glass bottle with foreign writing on it, which he thought was rather strange considering the fact that the only Cokes that came in glass bottles in Gotham were the Mexican ones that they'd recently started selling at grocery stores.

Shelving that little mystery for later, he went over to Kent, bracing himself for what was to come since he wasn't all that nuts about Star Trek. Attending a convention wasn't exactly his idea of fun, which, come to think of it, was probably why Gabrielle had sent him. At least with him, she knew that he'd be working here, rather than goofing off and maybe going home to grab his costume in order to join in on the "fun". In fact, he could name three co-workers who had probably called in sick just so they could be here today.

Off to the side, there was a news van that was disgorging crew and equipment. Unlike him, the reporter who was standing next to the van seemed to be happy to have the opportunity to put on a pair of Spock ears for her segment, which was probably why she'd been sent. With a visual medium like television news, the more the reporter was looking like they were having fun at such an event, the better the publicity the event would get. The better publicity, the more people. The more people, the more likely the people running this thing would pour money into the city by doing another one a few months or a year from now rather than quitting and closing up shop. A fun loving individual and/or avid Star Trek fan was the ideal sort of reporter to send to such an event.

Beside him, he could hear a slight snort.

"What's so funny?" he asked, turning towards his partner who strangely looked slightly amused, which startled him because, he'd never seen that expression genuinely cross the man's face.

"She looks like Cat." Kent replied, his face going back to cold and blank, the amusement vanishing back to from whence it came in the blink of an eye.

"Cat?" he asked, wondering if Kent was ready to divulge another scant detail about his mysterious past which he hadn't really talked about over the two days and change that he'd known him.

"A woman I used to know." Kent replied in his usual toneless manner, all amusement over the female reporter's resemblance to this Cat person long gone, and looking like it had never been there in the first place and instead had been a figment of Eric's imagination.

The conversation over, both men headed inside the convention center proper, and it wasn't only him who viewed the proceedings with disinterest. From what he could see, the newbie wasn't a Star Trek fan either, though he didn't make any disparaging remarks about the show and remained completely professional at all times. Strangely enough, while Kent was doing interviews, he almost seemed human. Sure, there was a little something missing, but it wasn't as blatant as it usually was.

As Eric watched, Kent even helped an elderly man with a walker into a chair. Rather than thanking the young man who robotically displayed manners that were becoming increasingly rare in this day and age, the old man looked up at Kent and said "If I didn't know any better _Mr. Kent_, I'd swear you'd made a deal with the devil.".

"Do I know you?" Kent asked the man rather stiffly.

"Used to be Metropolis P.D. before I got married and moved to Gotham." the old man replied. "Now, I have to resort to begging and sometimes even outright bribery to get the grandkids to spring me from the nursing home. That place has even better security than Arkham after they finally got serious and removed the revolving door that the Joker had installed as a prank."

Well now, wasn't that..._Interesting_.

**Edited 9-2-16.**


	6. A Day for Unwanted Reunions

"Deal with the devil?" Hernandez asked the moment he and Superman were alone and away from prying ears, which was surprisingly easy to do in a city of several million souls. The garage at the convention center where the man had parked his car was virtually empty at the moment. Mostly because everyone who was going to turn up at the convention today had already turned up, and it wasn't yet time for people to start leaving in droves.

Superman knew this moment had been coming since he'd noticed that Hernandez had been watching him with Simmons, whom he'd finally recognized after he'd mentally stripped away the wrinkles and darkened the flyaway white hair to brown. Seeing the avid young police officer who'd asked for his autograph on two occasions like that had reminded him exactly why he'd disengaged from the human race for the most part. Far from being an eager young man who was devoted to serving and protecting his community, Simmons was now at the very end of his all too brief lifespan and he was more devoted to actually seeing the community since he had little opportunity to do so. Simmons was of the first generation that he had seen born in its entirety, and would soon see die in its entirety. He, he on the other hand, he appeared to be only at the beginning of an unknown stretch of centuries, possibly even an eternity, that stretched before him.

"Mister Simmons thought I was the Clark Kent who used to work at the Daily Planet when he was a young man." he finally replied to Hernandez's question.

What he was leaving out of what he'd told Hernandez was that the reason Mr. Simmons had thought so was because he actually was the Clark Kent who'd worked at the Daily Planet for three decades, a portion of which had coincided with Officer Simmons' youth. While he very rarely if ever outright lied, he was an expert at leaving things out and saying things in a way that implied something else entirely. After nearly a century of practice in the art, he was quite likely as skilled as the elves of legend. In this case, the belief of the young in the senility of the old would likely cause Hernandez to dismiss Simmons' identification of him despite the fact that it was utterly true.

Looking back on the encounter with Simmons, he felt mild curiosity over exactly when the man had become one of the number of people who'd known who he was despite the often ridiculous lengths he'd gone to to keep Clark Kent and Superman separate in people's minds. The man had never let on that he knew back when they had interacted on a semi-regular basis. Back when he used to know every member of Metropolis' finest by name, and had often been able to recite a litany of their relatives' names as well, usually when making an inquiry as to their general health.

"You weren't exactly saying you weren't." Hernandez said, cutting his musings short. "And, that resemblance between you and your grandfather is downright creepy. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear it was you. Especially since the only places where I've ever seen a case of 'Identical Ancestor' are in films or on TV."

He sighed. This wasn't exactly how he expected the encounter to go. Honestly, he'd expected Hernandez to either accept his explanation, or pretend to accept his explanation and gather more evidence in case there was a story to be had, not directly confront him. Had Hernandez gone the gather more evidence route, he would've done to the man what he'd done to a couple of reporters back when he'd had a secret identity to protect, which was to find and sabotage the physical evidence they'd gathered, and shoot down the circumstantial stuff in such a way that the other reporter looked like an idiot for even suggesting that Clark Kent was Superman.

Of course, these days, had Hernandez gone the stay silent and gather more evidence route, things could've become slightly more problematic. That would especially be the case if Hernandez had a friend on the police force, since his prints were on file under the name of "Superman" so the police would know to ignore them if they were collected at a crime scene.

The question was, did he want to stay silent and start Hernandez digging until things blew up and ended Alfred's little experiment far earlier than the brat in the bat parka who'd gone to so much trouble had hoped? Living the way he had been for the last few decades was familiar, and had almost become comfortable to him since he didn't have to face little things like the much shorter lifespans of the humans that surrounded him. But, he still remembered how he'd wanted to be an example for people to strive towards like his father had wanted him to be. He couldn't be that example if he was cold, distant, and completely disengaged from the race he was supposed to lead into the sun as it were, and his becoming Clark Kent again was supposed to reengage him with his adopted race.

Perhaps if he got Hernandez thinking his secret was something else...

There was a great deal of science and technology that had been far in advance of its time which was lost when a certain young idiot had thought going around smashing up the lab was the best way to defeat a mad scientist who more often than not died at the hands of his own malfunctioning creations sometime during the destruction, leaving almost nothing salvageable behind. As a result of his more destructive phase, there were any number of scientists in any number of fields who absolutely despised Superman for setting robotics, genetics, cryogenics, and god only knew what else back by several decades if not centuries.

Human cloning had already been done, as had Kryptonian cloning, and Human-Kryptonian hybridization. Unfortunately, thanks to Superman and a rather inconveniently placed computer bank...

Which was a real pity, because it would've rather handily solved the issue with the current dry spell when it came to "Superheroes". The Twenties through the Seventies had been something of a golden age for people with masks and superpowers. Then, they all started dying off in the line of duty or retiring for various reasons - mostly due to age - with few if any to replace them as many of the situations that had created them in the first place were irreplicable. All that was left from that era were a couple of immortals or near-immortals like himself, and a couple of continuing legacies that hadn't yet died out without a successor to replace them, all of which he'd basically disengaged from when he'd mostly disengaged from the world.

Sure, there was the occasional team-up when the situation called for it, but usually, he kept himself to himself in the Fortress when he wasn't on duty and everyone but the brat in the bat parka had known not to drop by and make any social calls. The legacies who'd taken over the positions of their predecessors who were sometimes literally such after the Seventies and pretty much only knew him as he was now usually didn't even think to try visiting, and certainly never invited him to little things like a post-mission breakfast/lunch/dinner/drink/snack. Compared to the average human, a superhero tended to have an active lifespan more on par with that of a mayfly unless they were immortal or had a revolving door to the afterlife, and he had a nasty habit of referring to the legacies by their ordinal number to their faces. Being legacies, people like Nightwing #6 for instance didn't like to be reminded that they were mortal and that someone else would be taking their place after they were gone.

Realizing he'd been stalling way too long due to the fact that he'd somehow briefly gotten himself lost in a past he usually ignored these days, he formulated an answer to Hernandez's accusation. An answer that was a factually true statement, but implied something completely false in regards to him.

"Not all of those cloning hoaxes from the Twentieth Century were actually hoaxes." he finally said to Hernandez who'd been standing there looking at him impatiently.

Hernandez's expression shifted from impatience to shock to something akin to pity as he accepted this explanation. What remained to be seen was whether Hernandez would continue to buy this explanation or if he was the sort who'd pick it apart and keep looking for the real answer. Many people, once given an explanation which fits, will mentally toss out any information that doesn't fit with the explanation given. Others however would hold onto any incongruity and then demand the truth at the most inopportune moment, often angrily resenting the person who'd given the explanation to them for "lying to them". The fallout from such a blowup from Hernandez could potentially be interesting to say the least.

"Ouch." Hernandez finally said before dropping the subject and opening the driver's side door of his car. "You coming with me, or are you going to walk again?"

"I'm going to walk again." he said, not wanting to be confined in a car and transported a few short miles at a tediously slow pace. Since his return to society, he'd rediscovered his strong dislike of being confined in enclosed spaces, cars and elevators being chief amongst these.

"Suit yourself." Hernandez said with a shrug before climbing into the driver's seat of his car, slamming the door, and muttering "If_ I _were the clone of a famous newspaper reporter, I'd become a lighthouse keeper or something." as he put his key in the ignition, watching him walk away in the rear-view mirror as he did so.

As soon as Hernandez had passed him on his way out of the parking garage, he turned up the speed, fairly flew out of the garage himself, blew past any number of pedestrians, found a convenient spot, and took off into the air. Hearing the sounds of a pitched battle, he sped off in the direction the noise was coming from, and found the current Nightwing facing off against the latest Luthor wannabe.

"Oh great, it's him." the Nightwing grumbled as he came in and dealt with the situation with fewer casualties than there would've been if he'd left the Nightwing who'd had it mostly in hand to deal with things himself before turning and heading back in the direction of Gotham. "Oh great, it's him." was one of the more polite responses he'd gotten from the current generation of "Superheroes". Usually, the "great" was replaced with an expletive during the few times a year or so he'd bothered to interact with the current generation.

Despite his little detour, and the after-battle mop-up which had included giving a brief statement to local law enforcement, he arrived at the office before Hernandez. Part of the reason he arrived before Hernandez despite the fact that the battle between the current Nightwing and his apparent Arch-Nemesis looked to be a high-profile one was that the press had pretty much long since stopped asking for quotes after he'd pretty much stopped giving them unless there was an immediate need-to-know, such as if public safety was at stake.

As he approached his desk, he noticed that there was someone standing next to it waiting for him. Someone with an all too familiar smile. A smile that only showed when that someone had yet again been pushed into the gutter or worse and didn't want to give the bullies who'd done it the satisfaction of seeing him cry. The face that smile was set in was now lined with age however, and the head of shiny black hair that had topped it had become a steel grey.

Today, it would seem, was a day for unwanted reunions.

Clark Kent's children, or one of them at least, apparently hadn't reached the end of their natural lifespans, though said end was obviously fast approaching. Clark Kent had deeply cared for the children he and Lois had adopted, but he...he...what? As Superman, he'd always compartmentalized that part of his life, trying to keep the thoroughly human and therefore exceedingly fragile Christopher and Margaret out of his duties as Superman. As long as everyone thought of them as Clark Kent's children and he didn't treat them in a way that showed that he cared for them above any others while he was Superman, it made his enemies less likely to attack them in order to get to him.

Though he was sort of trying to bring him back if only to see if he could become the hero he apparently no-longer was in anyone's eyes, Clark Kent was gone, and so too was that relationship. It wasn't like forty-five years of complete absence, forty-five years of missed Christmases and birthdays, and his completely ignoring the births of his grandchildren, great-grandchildren and possibly even great-great grandchildren would ever be forgiven or forgotten. Even if he wanted to be their father again, wanted to be part of the family again, Christopher and Margaret's time was almost up and their descendants were complete strangers to him.

He couldn't stay away from his desk forever though, and reaching it would involve coming into contact with one of the children Clark had left behind the day he'd died and been buried.

**Edited 9-2-16.**


	7. Where To Go From Here

Deciding to get this, whatever this would turn out to be - be it an angry confrontation, or a tearful attempt at reunion that ends in disappointment - over with, Superman made his way towards Christopher. Looking at the man now, he could see elements of the boy that he and Lois had brought home from the orphanage more than sixty-five years before.

Well, actually it had been Clark and Lois.

Clark, who'd been caught up in the post-war excitement following the end of the Second World War, had asked Lois whom he'd been dancing around and who'd been dancing around him for years to marry him. Much to his joy and surprise, Lois had said yes, yes to Clark as Clark and not Superman, and he'd learned that a great deal of the reason their relationship had come to a virtual standstill during the war had been the war. During the war, both of them had been frequently going into danger in order to get a story, such as the time they'd been in Japan and Lois had nearly been executed because of his sabotage of Japanese military assets, and the time they'd traveled with an American convoy which had been about to come under attack by the Nazis, and Lois had nearly died warning the fleet. Lois had been afraid that one or the other of them would die and leave the other alone. Because she'd been afraid, she had decided it best to keep him at arm's length in order to keep the pain of that potential loss at a minimum. With the war over, there had been nothing to keep them apart and they had practically eloped.

Their near elopement which had only been attended by close friends and family and the minister who had married them had been something of a shock to virtually everyone at the Daily Planet except Jimmy and Perry who'd been wondering when they'd pull their heads out of their respective asses and get it over with. The party his co-workers had thrown the minute they'd picked their jaws up off the floor following the announcement that he and Lois had gotten married over the weekend had been loud, boisterous, and nearly had to be broken up by the police. Spirits were high after the war, and he and Lois had given everyone something they could really celebrate.

Almost immediately following the wedding during which he'd been given the shovel speech by General Sam Lane himself, he and Lois had started trying for a child, since Lois had been afraid that being in her early thirties made her a little too old. She'd been called an old maid enough times back in those days when being unmarried at twenty-five was considered to be really pushing it that she had believed there was a legitimate reason for why women were encouraged to marry young and start having children young. In this case however, it had been his fault and not Lois' that they hadn't had children of their own.

They'd tried. They'd tried for two years straight, until the day something happened. It hadn't been the blessed event they'd been hoping for however. Lois had been feeling ill for the entire week before the miscarriage that had nearly killed her, and he'd wondered why that was right up until he'd come home from saving a bus full of schoolchildren whose elderly driver had had a heart attack at the wheel and found her collapsed on the living-room floor.

After that day, they'd quit trying for a child of their own, but their inability to have their own children hadn't put an end to their desire to be parents and raise a family. By the spring 1948, Lois had been open to the suggestion of adoption. She'd wanted a baby at that point, and there had been an agency that would've given them one, and a newborn at that. For a sizable fee of course.

Lois had been willing to pay the money, but he had persuaded her to have a look through the local orphanages first before she paid for something which may not have actually been entirely legal considering how much money the people who had newborn babies on offer were asking for. He wasn't about to hand their money over to a baby mill or worse when there were millions of children around the world who needed homes.

It had been while they'd been touring the orphanage which was ostensibly run by the city, but only kept its doors open due to the generous donations of a number of wealthy, semi-wealthy, and sometimes even not-so-wealthy benefactors due to the fact that the money they received from the municipal, state, and federal governments didn't cover all of their expenses that he and Lois had met Christopher. When they'd met Christopher, his name had been Hikaru and his parents who'd emigrated from Japan in the '30s and had ironically ended up meeting each-other in an internment camp had recently died in a car accident which had taken place while he'd been rescuing a number of fishermen from their sinking boat several-hundred miles North of them. Following the deaths of Christopher's parents, the local authorities had been completely unable to find the boy's closest living relatives, and the child had been too young to be of any help in giving them any clues as to whether or not there actually were any living outside of Japan.

Christopher had been a bright, engaging child and, due to the dearth of Japanese-Americans in the area, the odds of him being adopted were far, far, slimmer than they would've been for most of the other children in the orphanage. Lois had been as charmed by Christopher as he and had immediately agreed to adopt the boy despite the fact that he wasn't white, and the fact that their country had been fighting his parents' people only three years before. When it came to the issue of adopting "outside their race", which was far more of an issue than it really should've been back then...Well, he wasn't exactly human, his parents had adopted an alien and kept it after it became apparent that the child would never be normal, and Lois had married said alien whom she'd learned was an alien when they'd become engaged. What had mattered then was that Christopher had needed a home, they had the ability to provide one, and they were willing to do so despite what the neighbors or even General Lane would've thought about them doing so.

Two years after they'd brought Christopher into their home and found themselves constantly dealing with a bunch of xenophobic idiots, and people who weren't exactly idiots, but weren't exactly ready to let the war go so soon, he and Lois had found Margaret. Or, Margaret had found them rather, and they had found that they had room in their home and their lives for her. For a time after Margaret had come to them, when it had been he, Lois, Christopher, and Margaret, their family had been complete. It wasn't perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it was complete.

While Christopher and Margaret were growing up into a pair of wonderful adults who were beginning to make their way in life when he'd finally left them, both he and Lois had worked outside the home, with him being absent far more often than Lois was due to his duties as Superman. There had been any number of missed events and important events he or sometimes Lois had turned up late to, and Perry had joked that Christopher and Margaret spent so much time at the Planet that they should get salaries of their own, but they had managed. There were times however, that he thought that the children had grown up into the people they were in spite of the parents who had raised them and him in particular, rather than because of them.

Considering the fact that they had apparently continued being who they were after he'd left and broken off all contact, and seeing as Christopher was standing there in front of his desk when he had every reason to stay away, it was likely that his belief in that regard was true.

"Hello Christopher." he said when he was within arm's reach, and therefore striking distance of the man he'd...Clark had called son.

"Hello." Christopher said, that "I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of seeing me cry" look still firmly in place. At the age of seventy though, it made him look far sterner and far more stoic than it had when he'd been a young boy who'd been stuck spending his entire childhood dealing with bullies.

"We should probably go somewhere else to talk." he said, making a gesture that encompassed the newsroom and a newly-arrived Hernandez who was giving him a curious look as he made his way to his desk. Turning, he started heading towards the elevator, confident that Christopher would follow.

As he led the way, he wondered exactly where he could take Clark's son. Heading to the nearest Starbucks didn't seem at all appropriate, despite the fact that the old man trailing behind him and surprisingly rapidly catching up to him had grown to be a virtual stranger in the more than forty-five years since he'd last seen him. This conversation just didn't seem to be the sort that one would have over coffee, and there was the fact that he'd...Clark had...he'd called this man son for twenty years before he'd left. He didn't feel comfortable bringing Christopher back to the apartment he'd technically not yet moved into either though, which left the question of where to go. Especially since he was currently in a city that he didn't know like the back of his hand the way he used to know Metropolis.

To his left, Christopher, who'd decided to try keeping pace with him rather than trailing after him like a small child, started laughing.

"What is it?" he asked, wondering what Christopher had found to be so amusing about this tense and admittedly very awkward encounter.

"You have the same look on your face as you did when you took Margaret bra shopping for the first time." Christopher said, amusement flashing in his dark eyes.

He remembered that day. The day that he'd been forced to confront the fact that Margaret wouldn't remain a child forever...

Lois had been away on assignment and it had been up to him to see to the Back-to-School clothes shopping for the children. Christopher had been easy to shop for. Margaret however, not so much. There had seemed to be some sort of problem with the fit of all of the shirts he'd selected for her that he couldn't put his finger on. Eventually, he'd realized exactly why the shirts he'd selected for Margaret weren't fitting right, and he'd found himself completely lost in the women's section of the department store wondering exactly what would be an appropriate brassiere for a twelve year-old. The fact that the salesgirl stood there and kept giving him looks that told him he clearly didn't belong there rather than offering assistance hadn't helped matters at all.

"I don't see how this situation compares to bra shopping." he said as he reached the elevator bank and pressed the down button next to the nearest elevator.

Christopher gave another laugh and said, "It doesn't. But, you have the exact same look".

The elevator arrived then, putting an end to the conversation for now. As he stepped into the elevator, he found that he was once again confronted with the problem of exactly where he was going, and what he was going to say when they got there.

"Still don't like elevators, huh?" Christopher said, breaking the silence when they were halfway to the first floor.

"What gives you that idea?" he asked.

"You used to have a bad habit of "accidentally" breaking them, and right now you're giving the door to this one the death glare sans heat beams." Christopher replied.

The conversation petered out after this. Eventually the elevator stopped and the doors opened, releasing them from its confined interior. As soon as he stepped out of the Elevator and into the building's main lobby, he found that he still didn't know where to go from here.

**Edited 9-3-16.**


	8. Dual Retreat

Christopher sighed as he trailed after the man he'd called father. The man who raised him looked just as lost as he did when he'd "died" nearly forty-six years before. Part of him wanted to be angry at the man, to curse him out for abandoning him and Margaret. But, every time he took in that lost half shut-down look, he found himself unable to be angry. He was sad, disappointed despite the fact that he honestly hadn't known what he'd been expecting would happen when he'd showed up unannounced, and he didn't even know what. A small thread of the old burned-out anger he'd carried throughout his youth was present, but it was overshadowed by this massive, uncertain ball of everything else that seemed to have settled in his chest and done its damnedest to crush his heart and squeeze the air from his lungs.

There had been a period of time when he'd almost hated his father for adopting him in the first place and blamed him for every bad thing that had happened to him since the adoption. He had felt justified in his burning corrosive anger, citing the fact that just about every last one of the problems he'd had growing up had stemmed from the fact that he'd obviously been adopted, and had been the only Asian kid in the neighborhood. Part of the reason he'd joined the military in '69 had been because it was something Clark Kent wouldn't have done, and sure as hell wouldn't have approved of.

He'd signed up because of that, and because, aside from rescuing civilians from battlezones, Superman had stopped interfering in wars since Korea, tending to let the humans fight it out until they grew sick of fighting, which meant that Superman would be staying out of his life so long as he was in uniform. The last thing he'd needed back then after his father had died and left for good was for the man's alter-ego to start interfering in his life, especially since he hadn't yet seen what had happened to his father as a death, and instead had still seen it as an abandonment.

After enlisting, he'd been sent to Vietnam where he'd been completely ignored by his father who had passed through to scoop up random villagers and put out fires. While he'd been on leave in Japan during his tour of duty, he'd started learning Japanese in order to have a connection with what the angry young man he'd been back then had considered his "real people". If he hadn't been a G.I., and hadn't known that if the M.P.s didn't hunt him down and drag him back, he'd be a wanted man for life if he deserted, he likely would have let his anger at the people who had raised him and the society to which they belonged lead him into denying that he'd ever been an American during that leave, wife and child waiting for him at home be damned.

Truth be told, he'd been bitter, angry and almost completely aimless throughout almost the entirety of the Sixties, even before his mom died and left him with the absent being who only went through the motions, occasionally drifting in and out of the house to make sure he and Margaret hadn't died or burnt the house down while he was away, to pin his anger on. That anger had continued into the Seventies before it had finally burned itself out because there was almost nothing left of him to fuel the flames with.

By the time his anger had burnt itself out, he had almost completely and irreparably ruined his life. Angry and wandering through life with no particular direction in mind was a bad thing to be. Especially when one has a young family that's starting to disintegrate, much like society had seemed to have been doing during the Sixties and Seventies. When he'd come home to find his wife gone, his son gone, and divorce papers waiting for him, it had not been his father's fault and he knew it. He'd been the one who'd made the choice to leave his family in order to go off and fight in a war he hadn't needed to fight all on his own. He had been the one who'd left his family behind this time and, rather than waiting for him to come back, they had left him in return.

Coming home to find his family gone because he'd left them had brought him up short and forced him to examine himself in depth. He had found that he hadn't liked who he was, and what he had become while he had let his anger burn unchecked an nearly utterly consume him. He did his best to change after that day, and did his best to make things up to his wife and child whom he hadn't really appreciated until the day he'd come home to find them gone and that he had nothing left but an empty home.

Even though his wife had returned for a time, his marriage had never recovered from his angry period which could've continued for the rest of his life if he'd allowed it to. But, he had done his best to visit his son as often as he could, even after the woman he'd promised Forever to had remarried. Eventually, he too had remarried and the son he made sure to never be more than a phonecall away from was joined with half-siblings from his side of the family as well as his mother's.

Part of what had allowed him to move on and start a new family had been acknowledging the fact that while the body was still there flying around the planet rescuing people, the man who had raised him as his own, the man who'd taken him to baseball games and helped him with his homework even when he looked about dead on his feet had curled up and died at some point soon after the woman he called mother had passed. It had been nearly four decades since he'd accepted his father's death, and started moving on from it as anyone would move on from the death of a loved one.

Now though, here his father was, back from the dead, and part of him dearly wanted to punch him for a variety of reasons while another part of him which saw that his father was just as lost as he had been five decades ago wanted to reach out to the man. He could now see why it might not be such a good thing to have a loved one return from the dead. The little mental pedestal you put your deceased loved one on as your mind starts erasing their faults abruptly gets knocked over the second you see them again, and the relationship returns right back to where it had been when they had passed on. If your relationship was as strained as his and his father's had been...Well, things could potentially end up being a veritable living hell.

From the moment he'd followed his father out of the building that housed the Gotham Ledger, his father's face had worn that utterly lost and vaguely panicked expression that it had when the man had wandered through the Woolworth's lingerie department with an absolutely mortified Margaret trailing behind him over fifty years ago. Just about every second his face didn't have that expression, which his father didn't seem to be fully aware of, it would slip back to that emotionless Superman mask which seemed to be his current default expression. The flat and empty expression looked as utterly wrong on the man with the glasses and the differently combed hair which identified him as Clark Kent as the lost and vaguely panicked one did.

Searching for something to say, since talking to his father caused the lost expression on his face to vanish for a moment as he concentrated on him, he fished around his mind for a topic on which they could converse. A topic that hopefully wouldn't end in an argument which would more than likely cause his father to shut down and retreat the way just about every other argument he'd had with his father since his mother's death had done.

"Nice weather we're having." he finally said, having latched onto what was probably the most neutral subject in existence aside from "hello". He got a slightly incredulous look in return. Looking up at the sky for the first time since they'd set foot outside, he noticed that it was completely overcast. He winced internally. His father needed the sun and cloudy days tended to be his worst days, the days when he had the least amount of energy until he finally took as much of it as he could, flew off above the cloud cover, and started chasing the sun. Saying what he'd just said, it would've almost sounded like...

God, he may as well have said "Why don't you just curl up and die?".

Before he could apologize, he noticed that his father had gone and retreated again. That blank look had returned and, for a second, it had looked as if his father was about to fly off and leave him standing there unable to follow. Instead of flying off however, his father seemingly came to a decision of some sort and picked a direction. Sighing since he knew there was no use talking to his father when he was like this, he followed. Eventually, the both of them reached the destination his father had picked.

"The train station?" he asked, a sinking feeling in his gut telling him they hadn't come here to watch trains.

"I'm sorry Christopher." his father said, the look he had when he was in full retreat and about to run off rather than finish the argument in his eyes. "I can't...I just can't."

Even though he knew better than to expect much, especially in the beginning, disappointment settled in his stomach like a lead weight pushing aside all of the other emotions that had been roiling since he'd found himself looking at his father, his father and not Superman, for the first time in decades. He didn't know what the right thing to do was at the moment. Should he continue trying to talk to him despite the fact that he was in full retreat and would only run off? Or, should he let his father have his space and try again later?

Seeing the Superman mask drop over his father's features and realizing that while the man was wearing Clark Kent's clothes, it was Superman he was looking at, he decided to do the latter, praying that he wasn't making a big mistake. Though part of him said not to, he would let his father have his space. For now.

He heard a bit of a whoosh behind him as he turned towards the ticket counter. He didn't need to turn around to know that his father, that Superman was gone.

Sighing, he made his way to the counter and purchased a ticket back home. Once the purchase was made, he pulled out his cell phone and made a call.

"How did it go?" Margaret asked when she answered.

"Horribly." he replied.

She sighed. While she'd told him all along it would go horribly, he had heard the hope in her voice as she'd warned him. Part of her had wanted their father back, even if it was only to see him once more in the end, as well.

"I'm not giving up this time though." he said.

He meant it too. He wasn't going to let his father slip away again now that he was back from the dead, or at the very least, partially back from the dead.

* * *

Gabrielle frowned as she watched Superman make his way to his desk, having returned from wherever he'd taken his rather mysterious "guest" who had come looking for him under his Clark Kent alias. There was a rumor going round that the alien who hadn't been seen cracking an actual smile in decades had shown actual emotion rather than faking it when he'd been with the stranger that he'd left with but hadn't returned with. Looking at him now, she could see that there was something slightly off about his movements. They were still as almost mechanically precise as usual, but there was something different about him now which she couldn't quite put her finger on.

Considering how much power he had and how much destruction he could cause if he snapped, different could be a bad sign. A very bad sign. An "Everybody Run! It's the Apocalypse!" sort of bad sign.

Wondering if Alfred Wayne had just put her and everyone else in danger for the sake of his own amusement, he called Eric into her office. After saving his work, the man had promptly left his desk and answered her summons.

"You wanted to see me Gabrielle?" Eric said when he arrived.

"Look, I haven't seen anything to give me grounds to ask Kent to leave, and it's possible that I'm worrying over nothing" she started, wondering if she would come to regret saying anything, especially considering HIS hearing. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound and all that. "But, if he starts showing any...anomalous behavior, I want you to report it to me" she continued, knowing full well that HE had likely heard her despite the fact that it didn't look like HE was paying her any attention whatsoever.

Eric gave her a long look before nodding and saying "Understood".

"Thank you." she said, dismissing him so he could get back to work.

As he left, she heard him grumble something that sounded suspiciously like "Shoulda been a lighthouse keeper".

Deciding that she probably didn't want to know, she did her best to get back to her own work despite the potential danger looming over everybody's unsuspecting heads. Keeping everything nice, quiet, normal, and on an even keel was probably the safest route at the moment. HE could just as easily kill everyone while they're running around and panicking as HE could while they were sitting unsuspecting at their desks should he snap and go on a killing spree, and a death you go to unaware is more merciful than one you know about in advance.

**Edited 9-3-16.**


	9. Home Sweet Apartment

Superman surveyed the apartment that the current Batman had provided for him. He'd selected the furnishings from catalogs himself, picking the cheapest he could get away with considering the catalogs that the Alfred brat had provided. Whoever had delivered the furniture and other home accessories had done a very good job setting everything up. From the looks of things, a professional interior decorator had had a hand in the end result. Either that, or the brat in the Bat parka who'd delivered his new computer which had a number of aftermarket additions from Waynetech's R&amp;D department while he was at work had directed things. Bruce had had quite the eye for patterns of all sorts, and that trait had carried down his line.

He'd half expected the brat in the bat parka to decorate the apartment with photographs and other items from his previous life as Clark Kent in order to remind him of who he'd been before; much the way he'd dumped him back into a pattern that was similar to his old life back before...Everything. The brat who'd been named after at least three different Alfreds, one of whom had been the man who had practically raised Bruce following the murder of his parents, had surprised him by proving he actually did have a little thing called tact. The apartment had the sterile unlived-in look of a new home in which the furniture had been selected for show, and none of his personal belongings or photographs from his past life had been tracked down and been placed on display.

As he set his coat on the coatrack that had been placed beside the door, the phone started ringing. Picking it up, he'd fully expected the person on the other end of the line to be the Batbrat or possibly even Diana who still periodically left Themyscira to act as Wonder Woman - though she did so less and less these days - welcoming him back to the world and gloating over the fact that his departure was as "temporary" as she used to say it would be before even she quit trying. Oddly enough, it wasn't the Batbrat asking how he liked the apartment that he didn't think he would be living in for very long or Diana who'd been increasingly losing patience with this fast-paced modern world that seemed to be zipping past her far more quickly than it seemed to zip past him. It was the Nightwing he'd helped earlier that day.

"Was there something you wanted?" he asked after the boy had finished saying the obligatory hello and asking if he was there.

"Whoa! When Robin told me, I didn't believe it! You really did move out of the ice house and get an apartment!" the young Nightwing exclaimed.

"Was there something you wanted?" he repeated, not in the mood to waste time chatting on the phone with the current Nightwing who'd apparently called in order to satisfy some sense of morbid curiosity on his part.

He could easily guess how the young man who was barely out of his teens had gotten the number, considering the fact that the Batman and Nightwing legacies had been tightly linked since the days of Bruce Wayne and his former ward Dick Grayson. The current Nightwing who guarded New York was not kin to Grayson, and neither had the previous three been, but the Waynes treated them all like family and the Bat family and the current Nightwing would frequently help each-other out of jams if they felt the situation called for it.

Considering the Kryptonian source of the name "Nightwing", this legacy should be the one he had the closest tie with, especially since he'd been the first resident of Earth to take on the name Nightwing back in the days before Kandor had disappeared following an incident involving a parallel Earth that he'd never been able to fully explain to his own satisfaction. Dick Grayson had taken the name on in honor of both him and Batman whom he saw as mentors as the name seemed to fit with the whole hero in the shadows theme that the Bat family had going. Dick had started his career as Nightwing in Bludhaven, but had eventually moved on to New York, and the subsequent Nightwings who followed in Dick's footsteps had claimed New York as their own. Despite the naming and the fondness he'd once had for the first Robin who'd been like a nephew to him at one time, he wasn't close to the Nightwings who'd followed after Dick, and didn't feel any particular closeness to this virtual stranger who was currently wasting his time expressing his disbelief over the fact that he was now living in a "normal" residence like a "normal" person.

"Was there something you wanted?" he asked a third time, cutting through the random jabbering in his ear which gave him the impression that the current Nightwing seemed to think his "moving in with everyone else" indicated that he was open to further social interaction. Either that, or the rumor that he'd moved South had gone through the grapevine and the current Nightwing who had a tendency to babble like a brook when a social situation was making him nervous had been tasked with calling him to confirm it due to the fact that the young man was the costumed crimefighter he'd most recently interacted with. Either way, it looked like he would be stuck interacting either on an individual or team basis with the few "Superheroes" left outside of the normal course of their work far more often than he'd like in the near future. At least until the novelty of Superman living in an apartment and using his old name which the "old-timers" had all known about wore off and a new normal established itself.

Hopefully, they would get over their curiosity soon. He tended to interact with the other superheroes less than he did with ordinary Law Enforcement for several reasons. Lifespan was one issue. The somewhat arrogant attitude that was pervasive amongst the younger generations who hadn't had to face the near world-ending crises that his generation had faced a number of times was another. Aside from the one or two "Old-timers" who hadn't retired in the years since he'd abandoned his former life as Clark Kent and moved into the Fortress full-time, he hadn't gone through any real trials by fire with any of the currently active superheroes who seemed to focus more on PR and charity events for their favorite causes than crimefighting these days.

Of course, the reason he and the current generation of superheroes hadn't gone through any trials by fire had been because he and his generation had dealt with the worst of the threats to the world to date, and the current crop of criminals who had been inspired by Super-villains of generations past weren't of the same caliber, but still...

The second repetition of "Was there something you wanted?" seemed to have done the trick. Nightwing #6 (or #8 or #9 rather, depending on how you counted them as two who had the name had not been part of Grayson's legacy and he never counted himself, but some did) had finally fallen silent and there was dead air tinged with static on the line.

"Well, uh,..." the Nightwing finally said after nearly half a minute of silence which had sounded almost disturbing after the endless chatter and numerous iterations of "I don't believe it!"

"Was there something you wanted?" he asked a fourth time, about ready to hang up and wash his hands of the nearly three minutes of his life he wouldn't be getting back. He really should've hung up earlier, but a sort of morbid curiosity of his own which wondered exactly where and how far the young Nightwing was going to take this had crept in, and he couldn't bring himself to hang up. This unwanted conversation almost held his fascination the way train wrecks and other disasters caught and held the fascination of human passers-by.

"Well, um, there's this party this weekend, and Robin wondered if maybe...But, well, he didn't have the guts to call, and since...Well, since you're out of the ice house and all..." the young Nightwing who seemed to be working his way back up to a full babble said.

"No." he replied without even thinking, despite the fact that the invite had rather thrown him. He didn't go to any of the parties the teams which seemed to break up and reform at random threw in order to foster teamwork and increase inter-team cooperation as well as relieve the stresses of their jobs which did include at least some crimefighting and humanitarian aid since the world wasn't completely crime-free and disasters still happened. He hadn't attended any superhero parties since 1969 when he'd put in a brief appearance at one of the last "SuperFriends" bashes before walking out and not attending another. They'd stopped inviting him to any parties sometime around 1980 or so. To receive an invite to one out of the blue like this had indeed been a surprise. A surprise that he strongly suspected Alfred had had a hand in. But, that didn't mean that he'd accept the invitation.

There'd been a time when he'd been the one hosting at least one of the seemingly monthly parties every year. A time when he'd throw on that ridiculous apron that Lois had gotten him and fire up the barbecue with his heat vision while everyone who could fly landed in his back yard carrying those who couldn't and Aquaman basically commandeered his swimming pool, complaining about the chlorine all the while. He and Lois used to pass the events off as a relaxed open interview with any superhero who chose to attend when anyone asked what was going on and why Wonder Woman was yet again trying to lasso a slightly inebriated Flash on his front lawn.

That time was more than fifty years gone now. He hadn't hosted one of the Justice League shindigs since that last one in '62, back about a week and a half before Lois had passed. He had only gone to the last several parties he'd attended prior to the one where he'd made a two-minute appearance before ducking out and not coming back in '69 to end the nagging and the endless questions of "Are you alright?" from his friends and colleagues.

Eventually, he'd altogether stopped attending meetings of the Justice League which had disbanded and reformed at least three times over his lifetime and worked mostly solo.

"Well, uh, sorry to bother you." the Nightwing said, cutting into his musings on his past which he probably would've found far more depressing if he'd been the man he used to be fifty years before. The man that the Batbrat wanted him to become again, since he thought Clark would ignite some sort of spark which would inspire him, and his renewed fire would inspire those who interacted with him in turn.

Taking the Nightwing's hesitant apology as his cue, he ended the call. Somehow, pressing a button didn't convey the same sense of satisfaction that setting a receiver down more firmly than one should used to. Time was when someone used to know they'd been hung up on, and based on how firmly the receiver had been slammed down at the end of the call, they'd know exactly how badly the conversation had ended. Nowadays, your only warning was a beep, if that.

Sighing at the utter pointlessness of his most recent interaction with the current Nightwing, he turned to the computer to check his undoubtedly almost empty e-mail inbox and see what additional bells and whistles had been added to his computer since he wasn't in the mood to watch t.v.. As he accessed the personal inbox that Alfred had set up for him, the phone started ringing again. Not in the mood to talk with anybody after that last utterly pointless call, he let it go to voicemail, which was fortunately a silent process nowadays, meaning he didn't have to hear what the person on the other end of the line had to say until he was in the mood to retrieve the message himself.

Ten minutes after the first call, there was a second.

What was it about the fact that he had a telephone that seemed to invite people to call him?

When the phone rang a third time that hour, he decided that he didn't want to deal with it. Rather than switching to the suit and going to work, he found himself doing something he hadn't done since the days of Clark Kent. Much to his surprise, he had grabbed his coat and went for an aimless stroll the way he used to when he was blocked on a story or other problem. He'd been nearly three blocks away from his new apartment when he finally processed what he was doing.

He'd been two seconds from taking off into the air when he realized that, since he was already out there in the city and already dressed as Clark, he may as well do something constructive with his time. Seeing as he was playing reporter, he may as well do the job right, and two things that a reporter needed were a familiarity with his environment and contacts he could use as sources. He had neither at the moment. Gotham had changed somewhat over the decades since the days when he'd occasionally cross the bridge in order to get a story that may be of interest to his Metropolitan readers, and virtually all of the contacts he'd once had in the city had either died of old age or were coming close to doing so. Even the children he used to bribe with candy and pocket change to bring him some interesting information he might be able to use were old enough to be grandparents now.

Turning away from his original route, he made his way to the nearest center of activity that wasn't a nightclub.

**Edited 9-3-16.**


	10. Memory City

It was while wandering through the nightlife of a city rather than flying over it, interacting with it rather than staying apart from it, that Superman felt all of his years press down on him the most. Part of the reason for this was that he had perfect recall. Though he could file things away in his memory and not think about them for years or even decades, he never really forgot them. That perfect recall was currently overlaying an image of the street he was walking down from the 1940s onto what he was seeing of the street in the here and now and drawing comparisons. Being a part of the city that usually didn't pack it in until around midnight even then, the street was just as active in his memory as it was tonight. Every once in a while, he found himself spotting an individual walking into one of the establishments that ran along this street which had long been a part of the entertainment district who could be the grandchild or the great-grand child of someone who had been wandering about on the street that night in 1946. Someone whose ghostly image walked through a person or object that wasn't there back then as the memory overlay continued.

One major difference between now and then was the complete lack of unaccompanied children. There were no children running loose in the street playing, begging, selling things, or stealing anything and everything they could get their little hands on. There were no homeless ragamuffins under the age of sixteen or so sleeping in doorways or wandering about tonight. Or, if there were, they were keeping well away from here. The few children he had spotted walking along this evening were accompanied by an adult; and, if he did happen to find any unaccompanied children at this hour, he would be duty bound to turn them over to Social Services rather than employ them as informants and let them run loose on the street since children were no-longer allowed to be running loose after dark. Or in the daytime either for that matter.

People cared more these days, and they were more fearful and more interfering by far when it came to the lives of their children and those of others. As a result of the more caring nature of man, or at least the cultural shift in attitudes towards what constituted appropriate childcare, there were now better options in regards to places to send homeless and/or abused and/or neglected kids to in Gotham. It was no-longer a choice between relatives who made the street seem a safer option, a ratty hellhole of a deathtrap orphanage run by the dregs of society who were looking to make a profit on the plight of the kiddies in their care, or a poor but nice orphanage that was liable to be burned down by the latest maniac looking to make a reputation for themselves on what was practically a weekly basis. Much of this was thanks to tighter Child Welfare laws made on a national level, and increased government inspections of any facility that takes on the responsibility of caring for children regardless of whoever they had previously belonged to. Bruce and his family had also contributed heavily to this, through both their donations, and their efforts to weed out corrupt officials who might be open to being bribed to look the other way by the childcare facilities they were supposed to be inspecting.

On this night, people with children accompanying them clutched their children close to them as if they were afraid they might lose them, or that someone in the evening crowd might snatch them. People without children with them were far less watchful than the parents, and the people who had wandered through that night in 1946. Women didn't guard their purses as closely as they did back then. Men's eyes didn't watch every dark nook and cranny as if they expected an attacker to suddenly emerge and ruin their evening. Strangely, despite being less watchful and on guard, people didn't linger on the street. They didn't stop and chat, but instead, they hurried to wherever it was they were going without a word to any of the people surrounding them unless said people were accompanying them or unless one of the people accidentally ran into someone else.

Not really seeing anyone who was liable to stop long enough for him to converse with, and wanting to find a place where he was less likely to find himself flashing back to a previous age, he turned down a side street where a part of historical Gotham had been preserved in the form of a small neighborhood of hundred and forty year-old Brownstone houses. As he did so, he found himself blinking in startled surprise as a much older image flashed across his memory for a second. A nighttime image of a brick-cobbled road, houses that loomed impossibly high in a gloomy gaslit darkness, and an impossibly sized horse-drawn cab rolling away.

Funny. He hadn't thought about the time he and his mother had gone to visit her sick and dying cousin in over a century. Despite the fact that he never consciously thought about it, and didn't pull up memories of staying indoors while rain streamed down the windows and his mother's cousin's breaths grew steadily more labored with each passing hour, the utterly gloomy fortnight he'd spent in Gotham tending to Agnes Clark and eventually attending her funeral had left such a negative impression on him that he'd never thought twice about going to Metropolis U despite the fact that UNJ Gotham, which he'd also been accepted at, was at the time the more prestigious of the two by far. Even now, as he walked down this street, past brownstones whose facades hadn't changed all that much in the century since his mother's elderly cousin's funeral, he could smell the reek of medicines that the FDA would've had conniptions over in this day and age.

Looking up at the house that had once belonged to Agnes Clark, he remembered how her passing at the ripe old age of 87 had been almost immediately overshadowed by the news of an even greater tragedy. There were very few left in the world who could say that they remembered what they were doing when they got word that the Titanic sank. With all of the funerals and memorials for those whose bodies that would remain unrecovered going on that week, poor old Agnes had gotten lost in the shuffle as the rest of the family had been off attending the funeral of his mother's nephew's son who had been returning from a business trip to England. His mother had been torn between wanting to attend the funeral of the grandson of her sister who had remained in her native Metropolis, and seeing to it that at least someone in the family was there when poor old Agnes had been laid to rest. In the end, what she saw as duty to Agnes won out, and he and his mother were amongst the tiny handful of mourners present at Agnes' funeral.

Usually, when he remembered 1912, he tended to focus on the Summer when his father had decided he was old enough to do little things around the farm like feed the chickens and collect their eggs. That was the Summer that his father had shown him how to fix a plow. The Summer when Ben Hubbard's new tractor had been the talk of the county...

The sound of a cape flapping in the breeze and the thud of a pair of booted feet landing on nearby pavement pulled him out of memories he hadn't examined in a good long time.

"Is there something about that house I should know about?" the Bat brat asked from behind him.

"No," he replied. Deciding not to give the much younger man more information than he felt was necessary. Besides, knowing Bruce, there was likely a fully detailed file on him that the man's great-grandson could read if he wanted to know about how he and the house were connected.

Turning and leaving before the Bat brat could pull his vanishing act less skillfully than Bruce who'd had it down to an art form, he started walking towards where there was more people. He wouldn't be able to "connect" with the city if he didn't interact with any of the inhabitants after-all. Since this area was bringing up so many memories, he decided that he would try and find a newer part of the city where old memories and ghosts of the past wouldn't overshadow the present.

Easier said than done in a city that is over two-hundred years old with a street layout that hasn't changed all that much in well over a century. Many of the buildings may be new, but those were the same old streets running in the same directions they had run when they had been laid out in whichever phase of Gotham's expansion they'd been planned during. Step down one road, and you'd find yourself in what had been suburbs sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred years before, but was now city proper. Even the frequently rearranged parks that dotted the city were old by even his standards.

After about an hour's walking, he finally found an area he'd never actually set foot in and therefore didn't have any ground-level memories of. It wasn't a particularly nice area. But, from this perspective, it was new to him.

"Are you lost?" someone asked, pulling him out of his musings as he passed a park that he vaguely recognized as having flown over several times on his way to visit Bruce. The neighborhood surrounding the park had gone sharply downhill in the decades since he'd last flown over it, though the ethnic mix strangely hadn't changed all that much. In this case, it seemed to be more a case of "Money flight" rather than "White flight" after the neighborhood had lost its "Trendy High Class" status the minute some common greengrocer with a little more money than usual managed to purchase a house here. There were still signs of the period when the neighborhood was blue collar before it had transitioned to no-collar layered over the skeletal traces of the time when this neighborhood had been home to the upper-upper-upper Middle-Class furs and pearls set.

"No," he replied to the person who didn't sound to have asked that question out of concern for what may have looked like an out of place tourist. "I'm just going for a walk."

"Well," said the person of near-indeterminate gender with long dyed hair who was wearing jeans and a t-shirt from some band that had last toured back before they were born, sounding a mix between threatening and suspicious. "I suggest you _walk _elsewhere".

Ah yes, that old Gothamite suspicion that had been lacking elsewhere and he'd thought might actually have been gone for good rears its head once more. While an excellent survival trait in Gotham, one could use it to spot a Gothamite anywhere else. The people in Metropolis had always been a good deal more open than your average Gothamite. At least they used to be. To be honest, he hadn't spent all that much time in Metropolis in the last four decades, so he didn't really know how everything stood now. For all he knew, they could've become just as closed off and suspicious as their neighboring Gothamites.

"Why should I?" he asked the individual, finding himself not wanting to be chased off of his chosen course by a bunch of suspicious locals on his first stroll in ages. "It's a free country, and I'm not hurting anything."

Clark would've apologized and left after a bit of passive-aggressive retaliation courtesy of a bout of "clumsiness" that left the other individual far more humiliated than he at this point, rather than invited open conflict as he had. He wasn't feeling the least bit "Clarkish" at this moment. Truth be told, the fact that he was feeling anything at this moment had surprised him. But, by all metrics, today hadn't been all that good of a day. He'd been pushed outside of his comfort zone by unwanted reunions, unwanted contact by individuals who normally knew well enough to leave him alone, and by his own memory. This minor annoyance that would normally be nothing was fast becoming a last straw for no reason he could discern.

"This is _my _ neighborhood, and you don't belong" the person replied, moving to a more aggressive stance.

"Who are you to decide where I do or don't belong?" he asked, bristling slightly as he fought back certain instincts that were triggered by the aggressive stance that the individual had taken. It had been decades since someone who wasn't a villain or a wannabe villain had moved in an aggressive manner around him. He had to keep reminding himself that he was dressed like Clark and that this person who had no clue who he really was was just some idiot who was trying to pick a fight, not someone who was trying their hand at mass murder or world domination.

"Neighborhood watch." the person practically growled.

"You don't look like neighborhood watch." he replied, looking the person up and down in what he full well knew was a condescending manner, making sure that his eyes were seen to linger on that long mess of acid-green hair, which was a very poor color choice for Gotham, and the holes in the knees of the individual's ripped jeans.

"This person bothering you Alex?" a rather large man who looked to be related to the person asked, cutting off whatever idiotic response "Alex" had been about to make to his comment.

"No," he replied before "Alex" could say anything. "Alex was just bothering me."

"And," the hulking stranger said, "What were you doing when Alex started _bothering _you?"

"I was taking a walk." he replied, half tempted to push past these two individuals, leave this behind, and then leave this whole charade behind, his dead fathers' wishes be damned.

"Nobody takes walks around here." the man said disbelievingly, making an expressive gesture that took in the generally poor condition of the neighborhood and the run-down buildings they were surrounded by.

"Up until about a minute ago, I was." he responded, irritated at this latest annoyance to come along and wondering how meeting people on a walk he'd taken for the sole purpose of meeting people could've gone so wrong.

"Well, I suggest you walk elsewhere." Alex's relative replied, trying to look menacing. Had he been anybody else, the man would've succeeded. As it was, he was stuck fighting down instincts that were telling him to take this guy down and fast.

"I'd leave that one alone if I were you." an elderly voice cut through the situation.

"Go back inside grandma!" the man who had tried to look menacing yelled.

"Don't think you're too big for me to take a switch to you boy!" the old woman said. "I said leave that one alone!"

"Why should I?! We don't need strangers wandering our neighborhood, especially not when..." the woman's grandson replied.

"I ain't going to be attending your funeral boy! I ain't going to be burying another one of you, not at my age! I said leave that one alone!" the old woman said, coming closer and raising the standing cane she'd been using to support herself.

"And you!" the woman said threateningly, causing him to take an involuntary step backwards, as angry old ladies invariably brought up images of his mother "You run along and leave mine alone before I call Father Jones! Don't think I don't know what you are! I seen you survive things you'd need a deal with Down Below to survive damn near eighty years ago!"

It would seem that the one major flaw in the Bat brat's plan, the fact that there are people who had previously encountered and still remember Clark Kent still living, would be randomly rearing its head on a possibly semi-regular basis. If tonight was any indication, he wouldn't even be able to go for a walk without being assaulted by his past. Quite possibly literally.

"You heard me!" the old woman yelled, doing her level best to keep the tremor of fear that underlied the stern anger out of her voice. "Go on! Get!"

Honestly, he should've figured something like this might happen someday if he kept being Clark, or at least playing him until he became him again. He had done his level best to keep Clark separate from Superman, and not everyone was Officer Simmons. Even back in the Sixties, there had been people that had crossed themselves as he passed. He'd thought it an exaggerated joke, but considering how many of Clark Kent's "Near death experiences" would have been unsurvivable by anyone else...

**Edited 9-4-15.**


End file.
